Good morning. Troubling news today in the desserts sector: Ranch ice cream.

Yes, for some reason the good folks at Van Leeuwen have released Hidden Valley Ranch ice cream, for purchase exclusively at the underground ice cream lover’s paradise of Walmart.

This isn’t the industry’s first time on the weird flavor express, either. Prior “fun” and “exciting” flavors include Mac & Cheese, Lobster, and Everything Bagel.

Why is this happening, you ask? Well, apparently 25% of surveyed 24-34 year olds said they’d eat more savory ice cream if more flavors were available. To which we can only and simply say: you know those foods exist already, right? Why not have an everything bagel for breakfast, mac & cheese at lunch, some lobster for dinner, and THEN eat some actual vanilla or chocolate ice cream?

Before this gets any more “back in my day!” old man vibes (ironically our median age is 27), let’s jump to THE NEWS.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 4.93 minutes to read.

“Deliberately seek the company of people who influence you to think and act on building the life you desire.”

–Napoleon Hill (1883-1970)

NEWSFLASH: Younger people think differently about politics than their elderly counterparts😱. That’s according to a new report from Pew Research, which conducted more than a dozen focus groups with 18-to-29-year-old adults in France, Germany, the US, and the UK.

And despite different histories and current political climates, Pew identified four distinct attitudes about how best to engage with the world. These were consistent across all four countries.

1. Right-leaning and internationally engaged: These folks view global cooperation as benefiting their country’s interests, and want to be seen as international leaders in diplomacy and/or military strength.
2. Right-leaning and domestically focused: This group thinks it’s better to focus on issues at home than to send resources abroad, and also strongly believe their country should strive for self-sufficiency.
3. Left-leaning and domestically focused: These young folks feels a moral obligation to help overseas, but they prioritize “getting their own house in order” before focusing attention elsewhere.
4. Left-leaning and internationally engaged: This group emphasizes their country’s moral duty to be involved internationally, but also doubts whether they can trust the government to be effective or to get involved for the right reasons.

🇺🇸 Closer to home: Decades of international surveys have found that younger adults around the world tend to be more supportive of international cooperation than older folks. But Pew discovered the opposite is currently true in the US – young people are more likely than older folks to say America should prioritize solving domestic problems over being active in world affairs.

🇬🇧 Gary Lineker, the top-paid TV host on the BBC, will resume his duties after being suspended for a tweet critical of the UK government. Lineker is a former England football captain who hosts the BBC’s weekly flagship soccer program Match of the Day. He was placed on leave last Friday for breaching the state-funded network’s impartiality guidelines with a tweet that compared the rhetoric of a UK government official to language used in 1930s Germany. Lineker was reinstated after his colleagues refused to work over the weekend in solidarity with the host, which forced the BBC to cancel core sports coverage.

🇦🇺 Australia will purchase nuclear-powered submarines from the US, President Biden announced yesterday. The first-of-its-kind sale, which involves between three and five submarines, is expected to pave the way for Australia to co-develop and eventually build its own attack boats in the coming decades. The deal was struck under a trilateral security pact between the US, UK, and Australia known as AUKUS, which is intended to counter China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific region.

🌏 Chick-fil-A announced plans to invest $1 billion in expanding to five international markets by 2030. In an interview with the WSJ, CEO Andrew Cathy said the fast-food chain still has room to expand in the US, but an international presence in Europe and Asia will be necessary for sustained growth in the future. Chick-fil-A’s US sales have quadrupled over the past decade, and the company currently averages more sales per restaurant than any other fast-food brand.

📈 The US drone industry has been running rampant and shows no signs of slowing… it’s projected to grow to over $583.5 billion by 2030. And things are about to change in an even bigger way, thanks to recent developments in drone capabilities.

🚁 Parallel Flight Technologies' proprietary tech allows drones to lift heavy payloads for exponentially longer. Where all electric drones can only lift payloads for 15 mins, Parallel Flight’s flagship model carries 100 lbs for 100 minutes – and they'll have a scaled-up model that can lift up to 500 lbs!

It’s hard to overstate the implications this can have…

• Delivering medical supplies/equipment no matter how remote or how poor visibility
• Automating forest fire prevention with zero risk to operators
• Providing critical assistance during emergency/relief efforts

🏗️ And that’s not even touching upon all the additional opportunities for commercial applications. Beyond manufacturing drones, Parallel’s model also encompasses maintenance and service, aka DaaS (drones as a service). Backed by NSF, USDA, and NASA, they’re already poised to make serious waves with 48+ letters of intent valued at $600 million in revenue.

Parallel Flight Technologies is fundraising now – learn how to invest here.**

Season 1 of The Last of Us ended on Sunday, with its final episode attracting a series-high 8.2 million viewers on HBO. And the fungus isn’t the only thing spreading among us: that’s up ~75% from the 4.7 million who watched the series premiere in January.

• ICYDK: The show is based on a hit 2013 PlayStation game, and follows characters Joel (played by the internet’s favorite dad, Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) as they navigate through a post-apocalyptic world where a fungal infection has turned most of humanity into zombie-like creatures.

🧙 Breaking the curse… From Super Mario Bros. (1983) to The Angry Birds Movie (2016), Hollywood has a long history of failed video game adaptations. So what made The Last of Us different?

According to the show’s creators, Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and Neil Druckmann (one of the game’s co-creators), the source material was already cinematic and narratively fulfilling. Mazin and Druckmann stuck close to the game’s storyline, only deviating when the change could justify itself emotionally.

• One of the most striking departures from the game is the expanded romance between Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) in Episode 3, which some fans describe as one of the “greatest love stories ever.”

💗🍄 The Most of Love: Mazin and Druckmann must be doing something right, because the show currently has a 9.1 user rating on IMDB – making it the 9th- highest-rated TV show of all time.

And more is on the way. The co-creators have confirmed they’re adapting the game’s sequel, The Last of Us Part 2 (which has a much larger storyline), into at least two more seasons of the show.

Get ready for an incongruous juxtaposition: the largest brain map that scientists have ever created came from the mind of a baby fruit fly. Ya know, those tiny lil guys that let you know when the bananas on the counter go bad.

According to a new study published Friday in the peer-reviewed journal Science, a team of international researchers has successfully mapped every single neuron and connection within the brain of a fruit fly larva. It represents the largest and most complex brain map ever created, per multiple sources.

🧠🔬 The methodology: Scientists used electron microscopy to study 4,841 individual brain slices – each ~1,600x thinner than a sheet of paper – from a six-hour-old fruit fly. They then reconstructed the insect’s brain in its entirety based on those scans, a process that took 12 years to complete.

💥 The impact: Based on the findings published Friday, future researchers will be able to study how electrical signals moving between specific neurons can affect fruit fly behavior – or in other words, how the insect’s thoughts are translated into actions.

And since fruit flies share many biological similarities with humans, the insights gleaned from the insect’s brain will likely help explain how our brain works too, per the study’s authors.

💬 Quoted… "Investors in the banks will not be protected… That’s how capitalism works.”

President Biden spoke publicly on both the SVB collapse + Signature Bank takeover yesterday, in his first public remarks since US regulators announced the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Federal Reserve would fully cover both bank’s deposits, relying on Wall Street and large financial institutions – not taxpayers – to foot the bill (dive deeper).

• But much like a pro soccer player in a gust of wind, bank shares still took a dive yesterday. San Francisco’s First Republic Bank led the way, dropping ~62% after falling 33% last week. Overall, major US regional bank stocks suffered their largest single-day decline in three years, the WSJ reports.

👩‍💼📈 Number of the Day: 77.8 million = the number of women in the US workforce as of last month, surpassing pre-pandemic levels for the first time and setting a new record high.

🤯 Did You Know?... 1 in 6 Americans (primarily men) have shopped while drunk at least once during the past year, per a new poll from personal finance website Finder. And as anyone who’s checked their bank balance in the morning with a pounding head and bated breath knows, the spending can add up. In fact, Americans spent a combined $14 billion drunk shopping over the past 12 months.

📖 Worth a Read: Where is Canada hiding all its tornadoes? → (NY Times)

🍩😎 What’s up y’all… it’s me, JP, the writer of these ads every day. What’s so important it has me emerging from my anonymous comfort zone behind a blue screen???

Well, I recently got The Wednesday Morning Scribe and want to share my experience firsthand. Right out of the package, I feel the quality. Sturdy but not bulky. Sleek, yet authentic feeling. Exceptional materials and construction overall.👏

And the daily questions keep me accountable and thoughtful, with important questions like “What am I grateful for?” or “Yesterday I learned…”. There’s great value in rating my energy/general feeling every day too, and the prompts to do so serve the greater goal of mindfulness.

🍩📓 I also snagged a DONUT Branded Scribes notebook! These journals were initially made for DONUT staff, writers, and superfans, but now they’re available to all DONUT readers for a limited time. And remember…. one journal is donated for every journal sold!🙌

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• ☝️ You’re looking at a rare weather phenomenon called “ice pancakes,” which were recently spotted on the River Bladnoch in Scotland after unusually cold temperatures across the entire UK.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💰 US markets closed mixed yesterday (S&P: -0.2%; Dow: -0.3%; Nasdaq: +0.5%).
• 🩺 Pfizer announced a ~$43 billion deal to purchase cancer drugmaker Seagen yesterday.
• 🚗 Uber, Lyft and other rideshare companies earned a victory yesterday after a California appeals court upheld that their workers should be classified as independent contractors; the decision is expected to be appealed to a higher court.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🏀 March Madness officially tips off later today with the Men’s First Four.
• 🎤 Drake announced a 29-date North American tour this summer with 21 Savage.
• 🏈 Day 1 of NFL free agency kicked off yesterday; check out a full list of the deals signed so far.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 😴💉 Sleeping fewer hours the night before receiving a vaccine is associated with lower levels of vaccine-related antibodies, per a peer-reviewed study published yesterday in Current Biology.
• 🤖 ChatGPT-4 will be released this week, a Microsoft executive announced; the upgraded AI-chatbot will be able to turn text into video.
• 🎗️ Many men with prostate cancer can delay or skip harsh treatments like surgery and radiation without lowering their chances of survival, per a decades-long study published Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
• 🔭🌕 Scientists at the Department of Energy announced a new project that aims to land a radio telescope on the moon within the next several years; the ‘scope is designed to explore the Dark Ages of the universe – an era of history some 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when stars and planets hadn’t yet formed (or so we think).

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 📝📈 A supplemental FBI report published yesterday found hate crimes increased by nearly 12% in 2021, instead of dropping as the agency initially said in December; the FBI said 91+% of the US population was represented in the amended data, compared to less than 65% coverage in its first report.
• 🛢️ The Biden administration yesterday approved Willow, a $7 billion oil and gas drilling project in the Alaskan Arctic; it’ll produce an estimated 180,000 barrels per day at its peak, or enough to supply ~1% of the US’ total demand. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

*🐕💗 Tens of thousands of pups are switching to Sundays for Dogs jerky style pieces, and dog parents couldn’t be happier. Surveys show dogs are 65% more excited to eat, have 40% softer coats, 41% more energy, and 30% improved weight. Save 35% on anything Sundays here.

CLICKBAIT

• 🏞️ The best US national parks to visit in the spring.

*Sponsored post

Yesterday we covered last week’s sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which represented the second-largest bank failure in modern US history, as well as the federal government’s plan to ensure all depositors are made whole.

❓ Our question to you: Do you agree with US regulators’ decision to fully backstop all client deposits at the now-defunct Silicon Valley Bank?

• 👍 Yes: 39%
• 👎 No: 41%
• 🤷 Unsure/other: 20%

Click here to read some of the best responses.

+Note on sample size: We received 7,184 votes and 624 longform responses.

Almost three years ago, Cherokee woman Mae Dean Erb started walking a 5K every single day. The healthy habit started as a way to beat lockdown blues at the height of the pandemic, with Mae originally setting a goal of finishing 100 in a row.

She just hit 1,000 🤯.

🏃‍♀️ What a milestone... Surrounded by friends and family, 79-year-old Mae crossed the finish line of her 1,000th consecutive 5K earlier this month.   

• “I don’t hurt anywhere," she told the Cherokee Phoenix. "I have knee issues every once in a while, with, I guess age, but it’s really wonderful thing (walk/run) to do."

There's an adorable Corgi wandering through the garden – can you find her? Hint: This puzzle is not to scale.

(keep scrolling for the answer)

👆 Check out the referral prizes you can get, just for introducing people you know to little old us. 

What to do: Copy your unique link below, then send it to anyone who you think would like the DONUT. Once you hit each milestone, you'll get an email with a link to claim your prize. (Pro tip: there's no need to ration points, you're entitled to a prize at each tier.)

Start referring.👇

Did you find her?!

P.S. Thanks to Reader's Digest for the puzzle.

**The Parallel Flight sponsor block was written and/or published as a collaboration between The DONUT's in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of The DONUT. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. The DONUT may receive monetary compensation from the issuer, or its agency, for publicizing the offering of the issuer’s securities. This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be investing advice. This is a paid ad. Please see 17(b) disclosure linked in the campaign page for more information.