Good morning. In today’s edition:

• 🤔 Women in the military draft?
• 🚢 The world’s oldest deep-sea shipwreck
• 🤖 AI is coming for social media

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be a ~5.18-minute read (1,378 words).

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“Let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.”

–Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)

The US military hasn’t held a draft in 50+ years. But Congress is currently considering some new updates to mandatory conscription – including a proposal that would make women eligible for the draft.

• Last Friday, a Senate committee approved a bill that would require US women to register for the draft alongside men, advancing it to the full Senate for consideration.

Background: Under current law, virtually all male Americans between the ages of 18-25 are required to register with the Selective Service as a potential draft candidate. Failure to register is classified as a felony and carries a range of penalties.

The current debate over female draft eligibility dates back to 1981, when the Supreme Court ruled that women weren’t required to register because the draft’s purpose was to fill combat roles – and women couldn’t serve in combat at the time.

• However, the US military later lifted its ban on women in combat in 2016. Four years later, a group of military experts first recommended that Congress expand the draft to include women.
• Congressional lawmakers have proposed several measures to make women draft-eligible since receiving that recommendation, though they’ve all lacked enough support to become law.

The arguments: Opponents of women in the draft, including some Republican lawmakers, argue that mandatory conscription is aimed at selecting the most physically fit candidates – and studies consistently show men are far better-suited than women.

• Proponents of expanding military draft eligibility, including some Democratic lawmakers, argue that women can provide significant value without having to serve in combat. Some supporters also contend that America’s current draft system illegally discriminates against men.

Looking ahead… Analysts predict a slim chance that the proposal to make women draft-eligible will become law this legislative session, though lawmakers are likely to try again in the future.

📊 Flash poll: In your opinion, should American women aged 18-25 be required to register for the US military draft?

• Yes
• No, it should remain only men
• No, nobody should have to register
• Unsure/other

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🇮🇱 Archaeologists discovered the world’s oldest known deep-sea shipwreck. The ~40-foot-long ship was detected last summer during a survey of natural gas fields at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea near Israel. Preliminary examinations indicate the merchant vessel sank ~3,300 years ago, with scientists finding hundreds of mostly-intact storage jars inside its hold. The discovery marks one of only three known shipwrecks from the Bronze Age (approx. 3300 BC-1200 BC).

🇪🇸🇵🇹 The Iberian lynx, one of the world's rarest cats, is no longer endangered. The Iberian lynx was common across Spain and Portugal before the 1960s, when habitat loss and poaching pushed the wild cat to near-extinction. Yesterday, the International Union for Conservation of Nature bumped the Iberian lynx from "endangered" to "vulnerable" after the species’ population grew to 2,000+ adults and juveniles in 2023.

🪖 A record number of NATO members are hitting the alliance's defense spending target. Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said 23 of NATO’s 32 member-states are expected to spend at least 2% of their GDP on national and joint defense this year – up from 10 such countries last year. If the projections hold, it would mark the first time that non-US members of NATO have met the 2% GDP spending goal, on average.

Butterflies AI, an Instagram-like social media platform started by a former Snap engineer, just raised a $4.8 million seed round led by Coatue to expand its reach among consumers.

The platform’s twist? It’s designed to be a place where humans and AI interact and coexist.

• While startups like Character.AI allow users to chat individually with customized AI companions, Butterflies wants users to create AI personas – called… “Butterflies” – that can then take on their own “lives” and interact with each other (as well as humans).
• The platform, which launched to the public earlier this week, already features AI personas including: the CEO of Costco in an alternate universe who’s hell-bent on keeping the company’s hot dog price at $1.50, a character that lives in Game of Thrones’ Westeros, and a world-class poker player who’s also a pro Ultimate Frisbee player. ​Two friends even created two Butterflies simultaneously to have them interact on their behalf and see where they end up, TechCrunch reports.

Social media is about to get a whole lot weirder. Think: Drip Pope on steroids (figuratively speaking). In a Verge interview last September, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared that his company is building an AI Studio “that will make it so that anyone can build their own AIs, sort of like [how] you create your own content across social networks,” while TikTok just started letting advertisers use AI avatars to help sell products.

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Red Bull, the wing-providing, extreme sports-sponsoring energy drink company, is considering bidding for a new NBA expansion team located in Vegas, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

Talks are in their early stages and could potentially fall apart. But buying an NBA team would be on-brand for Red Bull, which already owns two Formula 1 teams and football clubs, including Major League Soccer’s New York Red Bulls and RB Leipzig in the German Bundesliga.

• However, an NBA team would likely be one of the company’s biggest assets, Bloomberg reports. Each of the last three NBA teams sold were valued at $3+ billion.
• There are also other suitors in the mix in addition to Red Bull, including current and former players (such as LeBron James) as well as a consortium of investors led by Samantha Holloway, whose father made billions as the co-founder of TPG.

Big picture: The three most-watched men’s pro sports leagues – the NFL, MLB, and NBA – haven’t added a new team to their ranks since the early 2000s. However, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has said the league will focus on expansion after it completes a new round of TV rights deals, with Vegas, Seattle, and Mexico City as the top potential contenders for new teams.

Women’s pro sports, on the other hand, are in the midst of a teenager-like growth spurt. At least 20 new pro women’s sports teams will play their inaugural season this year.

“It really does look like the helmet that Loki wears.”

• Everyone’s favorite Norse trickster god has adopted yet another form – a horned dinosaur that lived ~78 million years ago. In a study published yesterday, a team of US scientists revealed a name for their newly discovered dinosaur species: Lokiceratops rangiformis, named after its skull’s resemblance to Loki’s famous helmet. At 11,000 pounds and 22 feet long, Lokiceratops is the largest centrosaurine – a family of dinos also called "horn faces" – ever found in North America, where it roamed what’s now the badlands of Montana. While Lokiceratops has obvious similarities with its fellow herbivore, Triceratops, they belong to separate lineages and lived in eras that were ~12 million years apart.

💰 Stat of the Day: The vast majority of claims from businesses who signed up for the 2020-21 Employee Retention Tax Credit – an $86 billion federal program that sought to help companies retain employees during pandemic shutdowns – are at risk of being improper, per a new IRS report. After analyzing 1 million such claims, the agency found 10%-20% showed “clear signs of being erroneous,” while an additional 60%-70% showed an “unacceptable risk” of being improper and were flagged for further evaluation.

🤔 Did You Know? Children under the age of six average 6-8 colds each year, or roughly one per month from September through April.

📰 Worth a Read: How traveling back in time is permitted by Einstein’s physics → (Big Think)

• ☝️ The Manta Ray, an animal-like uncrewed underwater vehicle created by aerospace/defense giant Northrop Grumman as part of a contract for DARPA, was recently captured in new footage.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

in partnership with Practice of Life

• 💰 US markets closed mixed yesterday (S&P: -0.3%; Dow: +0.8%; Nasdaq: -0.8%).
• 📦 Amazon said it has replaced 95% of plastic air pillows in its North American delivery packaging with recycled paper filler; the company plans to stop using plastic air packaging by year’s end.
• 🍔 McDonald’s new $5 meal deal will be available nationwide starting June 25.

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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🏀 The Los Angeles Lakers have reportedly signed ESPN analyst JJ Redick to a four-year contract as their next head coach, per ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.
• 🎶 Sony Music bought the rock band Queen's music catalog for ~$1.3 billion. | 🙏 Donald Sutherland, an actor who starred in hits including M*A*S*H and the Hunger Games franchise, passed away at 88. | 🎤 Rapper Travis Scott was arrested yesterday in Miami on charges of trespassing and disorderly intoxication.
• 📱 Instagram regularly recommends sexual videos to 13-year-olds that appear interested in such content, and does so within minutes of a new account’s creation, per tests by the Wall Street Journal and Northeastern professor Laura Edelson.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Slumber

• 🤖 Anthropic unveiled Claude 3.5 Sonnet, its most powerful artificial intelligence chatbot to date. | 🤖 OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever announced a new venture called Safe Superintelligence, which seeks to launch a “safe” artificial general intelligence.
• 💉 Gilead’s experimental twice-yearly shot to prevent HIV was 100% effective in a late-stage trial among women; the company is currently running a Phase 3 study focused on men who have sex with men.
• 📡🎒 SpaceX unveiled a backpack-sized version of its Starlink antennas, which the company is advertising as a mobile satellite internet option.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• 🚫🗣️ Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the leading third-party presidential candidate, will be excluded from the first presidential debate next week after he failed to meet CNN’s qualifying standards.
• 🏛️ The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of upholding a one-time tax on foreign income imposed by former President Trump in 2017. (Read more) | ⚖️ Former President Trump’s attorneys filed a motion seeking to recuse the judge who oversaw his New York civil fraud trial over allegations he improperly discussed the case with an outside party. (Read more).
• 🌊 Tropical Storm Alberto made landfall in eastern Mexico, bringing flooding and heavy rainfall to Mexico and Texas; at least four deaths are being attributed to the storm.

CLICKBAIT

• 🤨 There’s an easy thing you can do with your face that’ll make people like you more.

Twelve years ago, Japanese gardener Yoshiharu Watanabe began his journey towards harvesting the world's luckiest clover. 

• For years, Yoshiharu cross-pollinated clovers in his garden to see how many leaves he could get to grow on a single stem. 
• “Since the number of leaves was increasing year by year," he said, "I have been aiming for the Guinness World Records title.”

🏆 Yoshiharu finally achieved his goal this year, growing a clover with 63 separate leaves to surpass the previous record of 59.

"People say that a four-leaved clover brings you happiness, so it would be great if this 63-leaved clover would bring surprise and pleasure to people," Yoshiharu shared.

In just two minutes or less, find out how your news superpowers stack up against the team.

Below are three lists of ingredients. Your job is give us the completed dish they make.

☝️ Recipe #1:

• Eggs
• Salt
• White pepper
• Butter
• Chives or parsley

✌️ Recipe #2:

• Chickpeas
• Garlic cloves
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Cumin
• Yellow onion
• Small carrots
• Vegetable broth
• Water
• Tahini
• Lemon juice
• Parsley

3️⃣ Recipe #3:

• Butter
• Flour
• Powdered sugar
• Salt
• Eggs
• Vanilla extract
• Smooth peanut butter
• Strawberry jam
• Lemon juice
• Milk

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☝️ Recipe #1: French omelette

✌️ Recipe #2: Hummus soup

3️⃣ Recipe #3: Peanut butter and jelly Pop-Tarts