Good morning. In today’s edition:

• 🕯️ How candle wax could disrupt the space industry
• 🤖 AI is getting better at tricking humans
• 🏀 Unpacking the Caitlin Clark effect

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be a ~5.24-minute read (1,394 words).

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“A person is but the product of their thoughts. What they think, they become.”

–Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

Candles can set a mood, improve the scent of a teenage boy’s room, and, apparently, help rockets get to space. This month, a German startup called HyImpulse Technologies successfully completed a test-launch of a rocket powered by liquid oxygen and…candle wax.

The idea: Most companies in the space industry use a combination of liquid oxygen and kerosene to power their rockets. HyImpulse’s fuel mixture replaces kerosene with solid paraffin – a wax with a high melting point, primarily used in candles and various industrial applications.

And, while this “space candle wax” won’t make the atmosphere smell like a lavender-infused Mediterranean breeze, it does have a couple cost-cutting benefits:

1. It’s cheaper than kerosene. Using solid paraffin, which costs less than $4/kg, could reduce satellite transportation costs as much as 50%, per HyImpulse.
2. It’s nontoxic and easier to handle. HyImpulse was able to transport a rocket – complete with the paraffin fuel – as ordinary cargo on a container ship from Germany to Singapore to Australia, bypassing the need for expensive restrictions to prevent explosions.

Like JoJo Siwa, HyImpulse wasn’t the first with this idea. Researchers at Stanford over a decade ago found paraffin to be twice as strong as conventional solid propellants, and MIT’s Media Lab is currently performing experiments to test the material’s feasibility in future space operations.

Other space propulsion methods could also be on the horizon. NASA is currently working on a rocket powered by nuclear fission, which the agency says could reduce astronauts’ travel time to Mars by seven months (from nine → two).

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🌎 Global birthrates are dropping faster than anticipated. Recent data shows global fertility rates are currently around the point needed to keep population constant (~2.1 children per woman in developed countries), and may have already fallen below that level for the first time in human history. Birth rates around the world have steadily decreased since a recent peak of ~5 children per woman in 1963, with the decline seen across all levels of income, education, and labor-force participation.

🇦🇶🛢️ Russia reportedly found vast oil and gas reserves in the Antarctic. In a UK government committee hearing last week, several experts presented evidence that Russia has mounted expeditions to Antarctica for years in search of oil, despite such activity being banned under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. The experts also said Russia has discovered 511 billion barrels of oil on the continent – over 10x the US’ total proven oil reserves.

🇺🇳 The UN updated its data regarding deaths in Gaza. The revised totals, which first appeared on a UN office website last week, suggest the proportion of women and children killed in Gaza is lower than the previously reported 70%. Per the data, 40% of the 24,686 identified fatalities were men, 32% were children, 20% were women, and 8% were elderly. The UN office said the new figures relate to all “fully documented cases” out of an estimated 34,622 deaths, and also told The Guardian the revised figures were produced by Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry – similar to previous estimates – and hadn’t been verified.

Maybe Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning is on to something: Artificial intelligence systems are getting better at deceiving humans in ways they haven't been explicitly trained to do, according to new research published in the journal Patterns.

Some examples:

• Meta developed a program called Cicero that performed in the top 10% of human players at the world conquest strategy game Diplomacy… but to get there, the AI told premeditated lies, colluded to draw other players into plots, and justified an absence after being rebooted by telling another player: “I am on the phone with my girlfriend.”
• In a test conducted by researchers, OpenAI’s GPT-4 tricked a TaskRabbit worker into solving a Captcha by pretending to be vision-impaired.
• In another test conducted by researchers, AI organisms in a digital simulator “played dead” in order to trick a test built to eliminate AI systems, before resuming activity once testing was complete.

The programmed aim in these instances wasn’t necessarily to deceive… but they illustrate AI systems resorting to a Machiavellian-style “achieve my programmed goal by any means necessary” approach. Which could be difficult to correct for, given the “black box” problem that characterizes state-of-the-art machine-learning models: it’s impossible to say exactly how or why they produce the results they do – or whether they’ll always exhibit that behavior going forward, MIT Tech Review reports.

🤖 In other AI news: OpenAI yesterday launched its GPT-4o model, a newer, much faster version than GPT-4 with improved capabilities across text, vision, and audio.

Whether soothing your soul with serene landscapes or increasing productivity with picturesque mountains, Mother Nature does the trick like no other.

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Women’s basketball superstar Caitlin Clark will make her WNBA regular-season debut with the Indiana Fever later tonight.

And if the women’s basketball league had an actual fever, the only prescription would be more Caitlin Clark. Because while she has yet to score any official points, her presence is already having a noticeable impact:

• On draft night in mid-April, an audience of 2.4+ million viewers tuned in to ESPN to watch Clark go No. 1 to the Fever – more than 4x the previous record for a WNBA draft.
• The Fever averaged 4,067 fans in 2023, ranking second to last in the league. But after adding Clark in the offseason, the team now expects to be at or near capacity for all 20 home games (17,254 fans).
• The Connecticut Sun said tonight’s home opener against Clark and the Fever sold out all 8,910 tickets – the team’s first such occurrence since 2003.

Much like many of her step-back jumpers, Clark’s arrival comes at a key moment. The WNBA is currently in talks with TV networks over the rights for many of its games, with the league’s current deals with ESPN, Ion, and Prime Video all set to expire within 18 months.

Additionally, a new labor agreement between the WNBA and its players is expected during that span – and if Clark can keep attracting fans at the professional level, it could significantly boost players’ salaries.

💬 Quoted: “He is back."

• Keith Gill, aka “Roaring Kitty,” the GameStop stock enthusiast widely seen as the spark that set off the pandemic-era meme stock frenzy, is up to some of his old tricks. After disappearing from social media in June 2021, Gill came back Sunday evening to post a picture of a video game player leaning forward – the universal signal that the game is on (though it’s unclear as to what he’s specifically referencing). Gill may have been the main character of Netflix’s Dumb Money, but he’s looking a lot smarter today – shares of GameStop closed up 74%, causing short-selling hedge funds to lose ~$838 million. Fellow meme stock AMC closed up 78%.

👶 Stat of the Day: It’s not just Hollywood – parents are hopping on the sequel bandwagon, too. New data from the Social Security Administration shows the top-five most popular US baby names for boys and girls remained unchanged between 2022 and 2023. For girls, the most popular names were Olivia, Emma, Charlotte, Amelia, and Sophia. For boys, it was Liam, Noah, Oliver, James, and Elijah.

🤔 Did You Know? The world’s oldest chewing gum, made from wads of birch resin, dates back nearly 10,000 years.

📰 Worth a Read: The Inside Story of the First Untethered Spacewalk → (Smithsonian Magazine)

• ☝️ SpaceX launched 23 more of its Starlink satellites on Sunday, marking the space company’s 49th mission of 2024 – on pace to break its previous annual record of 96.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

in partnership with The Cold Life

• 💰 US markets closed mixed (S&P: -0.02%; Dow: -0.2%; Nasdaq: +0.3%).
• 🌐 Squarespace agreed to go private in a $6.6 billion takeover by buyout firm Permira, marking a 15% premium to Friday’s closing price.
• ⛏️🙅 Anglo American rejected a new ~$43 billion takeover offer from rival BHP, in what would be the biggest mining deal on record.

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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🎶 Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, while Drake’s competing diss track “Family Matters” came in at No. 7.
• 📺 Seth Meyers renewed his deal with NBCUniversal to host “Late Night” through 2028.
• 🏈 The 2024 NFL season will open with the Chiefs hosting the Ravens on September 5, the league announced. | ✍️ The Detroit Lions reportedly agreed to sign QB Jared Goff to a four-year, $212 million contract extension.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Mud & Ink Teaching

• 📱👈 Northwestern engineers built touchscreens that allow users to feel sensations like sticky, rough, or fuzzy.
• 🧠 Some patients with brain injuries who died after life support was pulled could have survived and even recovered some level of independence six months after injury, per a new study.
• 📚 Reading fiction books has a small but "statistically significant" positive effect on the readers’ cognitive abilities, per a pair of new meta-analyses.

*From our partners: 🤔🧠 We learn best by asking the right questions… Embrace an inquiry-driven curriculum with your students and watch engagement rise. Get The Essential Question Stack Pack from Mud & Ink Teaching free via this link – includes 96 questions to get you started.

MISCELLANEOUS

• 🎗️ Melinda French Gates is stepping down as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the nonprofit she and her ex-husband built into one of the world’s largest philanthropic organizations; she’ll receive $12.5 billion as part of her 2021 divorce agreement, which French Gates said will go towards work focused on women and families.
• 🔥🌁 Four US states – Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota – were under air quality alerts and warnings yesterday due to smoke from 146 active Canadian wildfires.
• ⚖️ Michael Cohen, the ex-lawyer of former President Trump, testified yesterday in Trump’s criminal New York hush-money trial. (Read more)

CLICKBAIT

• ✍️ The benefits of writing over typing when you’re thinking or learning.

Here are five stats from this past week that made our team go “whoa.” Hopefully you will, too.

• 🎤😂 Ticket sales for live comedy shows have more than tripled over the past decade, from $278 million/year to $910 million/year. (Read more)
• 🎯 WSJ columnists threw 12 darts at random stocks one year ago, then competed against fund managers’ top picks. The result? Pros earned 48% less than random stock picks. (Read more)
• 🗽 1 in every 24 residents of New York City is now a millionaire (~350K total), a ratio that’s 48% higher compared to a decade ago. (Read more)
• 💊 Over 115 million pills containing illicit fentanyl were seized by US law enforcement last year, up from ~50,000 in 2017. (Read more)
• 🇺🇸 27% of Americans say immigration is the most important problem facing the US right now, topping Gallup’s trend report for the 3rd straight month (its longest such streak since 2000). (Read more)

Yesterday, we covered how US consumer sentiment fell last month to its lowest level since November, adding to a growing number of signs that consumers have begun to pull a Fat Joe and lean back.

❓ Our question to you: To all US consumers: which letter grade would you assign to the current state of the US economy?

• A+/A/A-: 10%
• B+/B/B-: 22%
• C+/C/C-: 24%
• D+/D/D-: 25%
• F+/F/F-: 19%

Click here to read some of the best longform responses.

+Note on sample size: We received 4,492 votes and 429 longform responses.

The town of New Braunfels, located ~30 minutes outside San Antonio, is one of the fastest-growing communities in Texas. 

• When a local food bank noticed the need for more housing in the area, as well as more people needing their services and financial aid, they decided to take matters into their own hands and build an affordable housing complex right next door.

👀 Looking ahead... Construction is set to start next month. Once complete, the project will house up to 51 families in need for 24-36 months each.

🌛 Trivia: Who was the last person to walk on the moon?

🍋 True or False?... Lemons float, but limes sink.

🤔 Riddle Me This: George, Helen, and Steve are drinking coffee. Bert, Karen, and Dave are drinking soda. Using logic, is Elizabeth drinking coffee or soda? 

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🌛 Trivia: Eugene Cernan

🍋 T/F: True

🤔 Riddle: Elizabeth is drinking coffee. The letter "E" appears twice in her name, as it does in the others who are drinking coffee.