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A seven-year mission to bring back soil from the asteroid Bennu came to an end. The samples landed in Utah and may hold new information about the formation of Earth.
The British government is thinking about scrapping a huge part of a high-speed rail line. Once billed “Europe’s largest infrastructure project,” the connection intended from London to Manchester now might only make it to Birmingham.
The US is recommending that expecting mothers get vaccinated for the respiratory illness RSV. Aside from antibody treatment, the vaccine, given in late pregnancy, is the second new option to guard newborns from severe lung infections.
Hundreds took to the streets to protest the worst economic hardship Ghana has seen in a generation. Crippling public debt has led to a high cost of living and a lack of jobs, as growth forecasts slowed to 1.5%.
A new rare earth magnet factory in the US can’t elude China
The US is making a major investment in rare earth magnets—used in electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, and iPhones—to reduce its reliance on China. But Washington’s $94 million bet on E-VAC Magnetics to build and operate a major rare earth permanent magnet factory in the US won’t do much to temper Beijing’s sway over the critical industry. E-VAC’s parent, a century-old German company named Vacuumschmelze, has significant exposure to China.
🇨🇳 Roughly one in four Vacuumschmelze employees are China-based
🏠The company has production facilities there as well
🧲 It is a minority owner of a China-based joint venture with Zhongke Sanhuan, China’s largest producer of rare earth magnets
E-VAC’s China exposure aside, there’s also the challenge of Vacuumschmelze’s long history of operating losses. Quartz’s Mary Hui explains.
Quotable: A Pebble in the pond
“We really believe in a fundamentally different approach of going one by one, going slow and steady, going person by person, and creating a really great community for them, not putting a bunch of blue checks into a new product...” — Gabor Cselle, a former Google and Twitter product manager, in an interview with Quartz about building a Twitter alternative called Pebble.
Pebble, formerly T2, only has about 15,000 users, but that’s intentional. The co-founders of this new social media platform have wanted to move slowly and not break things. Quartz’s Scott Nover spoke with Cselle and another of Pebble’s co-founders, Sarah Oh, a former Twitter human rights advisor, about how they plan to compete with their old employer. Read the full interview here.
El Niño will help one unassuming industry—snow plowing
El Niño, a natural climate pattern which warms the Earth, will bring a mild and wet winter for many. But others will see the opposite: a prolonged, colder winter, with a lot of snow.
The snowplowing services industry is banking on another high year of high revenues. The US snowplowing services sector estimates it will take in around $25.6 billion in revenue in 2023, continuing a trend of increasing costs for plowing and de-icing.
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Surprising discoveries
Flamingos landed in the northern US state of Wisconsin. It’s the first time the species, which is usually seen along the Gulf Coast states, has been spotted in the state.
The teaser for Squid Game’s reality competition is here. The Netflix series maybe shouldn’t be made into a franchise where 456 people compete for $4.56 million?
We almost had an AI Hans Zimmer soundtrack. When a Disney director used AI to make a track, he described it as a “7 out of 10,” adding, “but the reason you go to Hans Zimmer is for 10 out of 10.”
A child’s shoe from 2,000 years ago was found in Austria. Its laces were still intact.
Silkworms were genetically modified to make spider silk. The material is six times tougher than kevlar.
Correction: In last Friday’s Daily Brief, we made a typo: 8 million annual riders are expected on Brightline’s high-speed rail line between Miami and Orlando, not 8 billion. Not the whole Earth’s population. Not 22 million riders a day, which would be the entire state of Florida. Our hopes for more high-speed rail in the US are big, but not THAT big.
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