May 26, 2022

With 1 day to go in the Roca Treasure Hunt, you might be feeling like Indiana Jones with the giant boulder rolling behind him. The good news is this will be the first of many Roca contests. The bad news is that Indiana Jones also had a really cool gold statue in that scene. And, later, a monkey...

Hundreds more people signed up yesterday, so thanks to all who are spreading the wave with their unique link. Let's ride! 

In today's edition:

• A lost city discovery in the Amazon
• Treasure Hunt Clue 4
• The wild firing of a flight attendant 

 Key Stories

Dolphins Identify Friends by Pee

A new study found that dolphins are able to identify their friends by the taste of their pee in the water

• The researchers, from Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, said “dolphins are the first vertebrates shown to have the capacity for social recognition through taste alone”
• Most vertebrates identify each other by smell, the authors said, and the finding “highlights how little we know about [taste] in general”
• It remains unclear whether dolphins pee to communicate or for other purposes, like dogs, who pee to mark their territory

• Dolphins were already known to be complex: They can remember other dolphins for up to 20 years and use sounds to refer to specific dolphins. This takes them to another level...

Largest Wave Ever Surfed

German surfer Sebastian Steudtner set the Guinness World Record for the largest wave ever surfed

• Steudtner had ridden the 86-foot (26.2-m) wave off the coast of Portugal in October 2020, but it took over 18 months for Guinness to confirm that it was truly the largest wave ever surfed
• The wave was at Portugal’s Praia do Norte (North Beach), which often sees record-breaking surfs. Others records were set there in 2011, 2013, and 2017
• “You don’t feel the size, you feel the power," Steudtner said. “I felt the most power of any wave I’ve surfed at Nazare”

• Below the sea off the Nazaré coast is the Nazaré Canyon, which reaches depths of 16,000 ft (5,000m). The causes leads waves to combine, leading to juggernauts like the one Steudtner rode. Check out footage of the waves here

Ancient Amazon City Discovered

For the first time, a pre-European city has been discovered deep in the Amazon

• The site is in Bolivia, on the southwestern edge of  the Amazon rainforest. The density of the area's forest has made exploring the location impossible
• The researchers used a technique called LIDAR, which involves flying a drone overhead and bouncing signals to generate images of places below the trees
• The researchers estimate that the city spanned about 1,737 sq miles (4,500 sq km), and contained pyramids, canals, and other structures. Until now, the presence of ancient Amazon cities was unconfirmed

• The researchers wrote that the settlement "represents a type of tropical low-density urbanism that has not previously been described in Amazonia." It apparently belonged to the Casarabe, a culture that existed between 500 and 1400 AD

Good Meat Erecting Giant Vats

Good Meat, a US company, is building the world’s largest bioreactors to scale up its production of lab-grown meat

• The bioreactors are 4-story-tall vats that will be used to grow chicken and beef. They’ll be located in the US and active as soon as 2024
• Good Meat says the vats will produce 13,000+ tons of meat yearly. The meat-making process involves taking cells from cell banks or eggs, enabling the production of meat w/o slaughtering any animals
• In 2020, Singapore became the first country to allow lab-grown meat. Qatar has said it will do the same

• Lab-grown, or "cell-based" meats, are drawing millions in investment, however its production remains prohibitively expensive. Advocates of the meat say Good Meat's vats could be a "gamechanger" for making it affordable

• The first person to send a Google Street View screenshot of the correct place wins $5,000, second wins $3,000, third wins $2,000 
• No in-person photos will be accepted. This is an entirely virtual game
• You have only 1 guess and it can not be changed
• You can guess at any time by replying to a newsletter, which goes out at 11:00 AM ET daily 
• Winners will be announced on May 31
• Full rules are at the bottom of this email!

• Zuck bucks: Meta is paying Illinois Facebook users up to $397 as part of a class action lawsuit settlement over data privacy violations
• Patriotic KO: A Ukrainian kickboxing champ died in combat in early April, Ukrainian authorities disclosed. He was killed in Mariupol
• My Beautiful Dark Twisted Big Mac: Kanye West designed a concept burger box for McDonald's and randomly posted it on Instagram

 What do you think?

See yesterday's results below the Wrap!

 Roca Wrap

In 2018, a New York City high school held a seminar on mental health and addiction. 

One speaker presented about the dangers of cigarettes. He'd tell them about healthier alternatives, he said, including one that was “totally safe”: Juul. The students left the presentation feeling as though Juul was just a “flavor device that didn’t have any harmful substances in it,” they later said.

The man giving the presentation worked for Juul. 

By 2018, Juul had ridden the surging popularity of e-cigarettes to become a $35B company that was selling tens of millions of devices a year. Juuls accounted for about 72% of all e-cig sales, up from 33% just 1 year prior. 

Many of those new Juuls, though, were landing in the hands of children. 

Between 2016 and 2018, 5M middle and high schoolers started vaping; between 2017 and 2018 alone, e-cigarette use among high schoolers jumped 78%, from 12% to 21%. Of these newly-vaping kids, Juuls – hip, concealable, and tasting like dessert – were their vape of choice. Many didn’t even realize Juuls contained nicotine. In reality, a Juul pod has as much nicotine as 1-2 packs of cigarettes.

The question, though, was whether Juul was intentionally putting its devices in children’s hands.

Juul claimed that it was not, saying that its devices were meant for adult smokers looking for a healthier cigarette alternative. Even the presenter at the school said that the company didn’t want the kids as customers and was just looking to provide information.  

Yet Juul pods came in flavors that appealed to children: Mango, Crème Brulee, Cool Cucumber. The company frequently advertised on social media and with influencers who reached children. They also spent heavily on web advertising – including on websites apparently geared to children. 

According to a lawsuit filed by the state of Massachusetts, Juul bought ad space on cartoonnetwork.com; seventeen.com; Nickelodeon.com and NickJr.com; as well as children’s education and gaming sites, including mathplayground.com, socialstudies.com, games2girls.com, and hellokids.com.

As concerns spread, lawmakers became curious: Was Juul safer than cigarettes? Was it helping smokers transition? Were it and its Big Tobacco investors marketing to children to grow their market outside of just cigarette smokers?

In 2018, the FDA launched an investigation into Juul’s marketing practices. With scrutiny building, Juul discontinued some of its fruitiest flavors, pledged $30M to anti-vaping efforts, shut its social media accounts, and shifted its marketing toward existing smokers. That year, it spent $900,000 on lobbyists and advisers to position itself as a public health company. (By comparison, tobacco companies spent $7M on lobbying in 2018.)

Within a year though, the FDA accused Juul of abandoning its anti-vaping plan, and the US government launched additional investigations. People started talking of a teen “vaping epidemic." In late 2019, the US raised the age to buy tobacco products from 18 to 21; months later, the Trump administration banned the sale of most vape flavors.

Juul couldn’t recover: Altria – Juul’s largest owner and the owner of Marlboro – cut its valuation of Juul from $38B in 2018 to $10B in 2020 and to $4.3B in 2021. From 2018 to 2020, Juul’s market share fell from 72% to 42%. 

Juul’s pods continue to sell in menthol and tobacco flavors, however its addictive, mango-flavored bubble had finally popped. 

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