Good morning. A copy of the first issue of Superman netted US$9.12 million at auction, shattering the record for most expensive comic ever sold by over $3 million. The copy was discovered in an old cardboard box by three brothers clearing out their late mother’s attic.
The original price for the comic was just 10 cents — now that’s an ROI not even Nvidia stock can top.
—Lucas Arender, Quinn Henderson
CONVERSATION STARTERS
🐶 A five-pound dog pulled 260 pounds in cargo. Lemon the Chihuahua managed to pull a cart with 52 times her body weight at the North American Weight Pull Association competition (a real thing, apparently). The competition gets so heated that some owners illegally dig their fingers into hot dogs to lure their pups forward with the scent. Shameless.
🏝️ A new app will turn your friend's vacation photos into a travel itinerary for you. Using location data and photos, the Boop app can turn the trip of a friend or travel influencer into a full itinerary that users can then copy and personalize. No more sifting through hotel and restaurant reviews on Reddit!
👁️ Apparently, we blink our eyes to the beat of a song. A new study found that when we listen to music, the rhythm of our blinking will quickly synchronize with the beat of the song. Next time you find a song you love, you can call it a real eye-blinker. It’ll catch on, we promise.
🧩 Canada is the best Scrabble-playing country in the world (sort of). A mathematician from Ottawa, Adam Logan, won this year's Scrabble world championship, his second time hoisting the trophy. Even if we all didn’t win, we’re happy to ride his coattails and declare our country’s Scrabble supremacy.
📺 We’re getting an AI-powered History Channel. Instead of grainy black and white footage or weird reenactments with actors, a new 10-episode history TV series will use archival paintings, photos and engravings to generate realistic scenes from historical periods.
TECH
TikTok knows people don’t want AI videos
TikTok is giving you the option to de-slopify your feed.
Driving the news: TikTok is rolling out a new feature that will let users customize the amount of AI-generated content that they see on their For You feeds. The social media platform is also launching an updated watermarking system to better identify and label AI content.
The move is a bit of a zag from TikTok, given that Meta just launched a dedicated AI video feed called Vibes (wonder how many million-dollar consultants it took to come up with that name), while OpenAI recently rolled out the Sora social media platform.
Why it matters: AI content has spread like wildfire on social media, and it’s possible TikTok (which says there are 1.3 billion confirmed AI videos on its platform, and likely more it hasn’t counted) senses people are growing tired of it.
More than half of the posts on LinkedIn are now AI-generated, which we can’t say is too surprising given the quality of most of what’s in our feed these days.
Our take: As online platforms become flooded with low-quality AI content, more people will demand alternatives that lean into real human-to-human interactions. Perhaps we will return to a simpler era of social media filled with baby pictures, life updates from people you haven’t spoken to in years, and out-of-pocket takes about our favourite sports teams.—LA
IN THE LAB
Source: vchal / Shutterstock.
We were going to use a picture of toenail clippings, but it was way too gross.
Could your toenails help predict your risk of lung cancer? A team of researchers at the University of Calgary seems to think so, hypothesizing that toenails can be used to detect elevated levels of radon, which is the leading cause of lung cancer for non-smokers. The team is now soliciting toenail donations to help prove the theory in a large-scale study.
Why it matters: Exposure to radon isn’t part of the screening criteria for lung cancer, despite the fact that an estimated 20% of Canadian homes have dangerous levels of the radioactive gas. The researchers hope the data from this study will expand screening measures that could help catch lung cancer risk for non-smokers, a group that typically isn’t screened.—QH
DROP THE PIN
🌎 Hint: This Caribbean island is the home of the West Indies cricket team, world-class beaches, and a certain global popstar. It’s also considered the birthplace of rum, a drink that pairs perfectly with its national delicacy: flying fish.
Think you know where we brought you this week? Lock in your guess here.
