Hi! Grizzly end: Three Californians have been sentenced to 180 days in jail for a fraud scheme that involved dressing up in a bear costume to stage attacks on luxury cars, before seeking ~$142,000 in insurance payouts. Today we’re exploring: |
- Weather or not: Students are more likely to apply to a college if they visit on a sunny day.
- Blue Sunday: An ASTS satellite just launched by Blue Origin is being de-orbited.
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College applications fall if weather is bad during tours, study suggests |
By now, most high school seniors in the US will have submitted their college applications for the coming fall. However, new research suggests that their dossiers might not have made it to the universities they saw on drearier days.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, a study recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research provides hard evidence for what you might have always expected: that bad weather on the day that students tour a college negatively affects whether they apply to that university (other major factors like facilities, faculty, and frats notwithstanding).
Based on eight years of data from an unspecified “highly-selective institution” in the Northeastern US (though the paper’s authors are, ahem, all researchers at Amherst College), the study shows the application rate rising to almost 32% for students that came on the most temperate tour days, up from ~25% and ~28% on the coldest and hottest days, respectively.
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(The data excludes the pandemic period, when in-person tours were suspended.) |
Meanwhile, the 30% application rate observed on sunny days slumped to 28.7% on cloudy days, and just 27.5% on rainy days. Interestingly,it was noted that the negative impact of cooler temperatures is driven almost entirely by students who hail from warmer states, with a 4.1 percentage point (14.6%) reduction observed for this cohort on cold days.
The paper also pointed out that, although weather conditions impacted whether candidates submitted applications to a college, they had little to no impact on whether students who did apply actually enrolled. However, there are other signs that “feel” is influencing students’ college picks, as the Sun Belt’s Southern universities are seeing a boom in students from colder climes.
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Blue Origin just reused a New Glenn rocket for the first time, though it wasn’t an unqualified success |
Shares in AST SpaceMobile nosedived in premarket trading on Monday after the space internet company’s BlueBird 7 satellite, carried by Blue Origin’s New Glenn vehicle, was put into an incorrect position and will now be taken out of orbit. |
Per TechCrunch, AST SpaceMobile announced that the satellite was placed in an “off-nominal orbit” around two hours after the launch yesterday, before following up with a press release confirming that BlueBird 7 had been delivered into a “lower than planned orbit by the upper stage of the launch vehicle,” and therefore will be de-orbited.
The company stated that it expects the costs to be covered by its insurance policy, though the outcome isn’t ideal for ASTS… nor is it ideal for Blue Origin. Indeed, Jeff Bezos’ rocket biz should have been celebrating the first reuse of one of its New Glenn models, as it looks to catch up with the lead that Elon Musk’s SpaceX has established in the private company space race. |
New Glenn — which stands at more than 320 feet tall, compared with SpaceX’s 230-foot Falcon 9 — could be a key frontier in the space race subplot of a broader battle between two of the world’s richest men, with the business empires of Bezos and Musk overlapping more and more.
Still, even with this latest Blue Origin launch and its promise of (hopefully more successful) reuse capabilities, SpaceX has been dominating the private rocket launch space. Thanks to models like the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship, Elon Musk’s company has clocked some 620 launches since its first successful launch in 2008, per data from the Federal Aviation Administration.
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AI is supercharging apps, according to new Appfigures analysis showing that global releases across both Google Play and the iOS App Store were up 60% year-over-year in Q1.
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Takes two to taxi: Tesla has officially expanded its robotaxi services to Dallas and Houston, but, per Robotaxi Tracker data, there may be just one vehicle operating in each city so far.
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Uses of the “it’s not just a ___, it’s a ___” sentence structure — often considered a hallmark of chatbots — roughly doubled in large company documents in both 2024 and 2025.
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Oh buoy… A life jacket used by a Titanic survivor fetched $906,000 at an auction over the weekend, while a seat cushion took $527,000.
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Meta is planning to cut about 10% of its workforce on May 20, Reuters reported Friday, seeing ~8,000 employees laid off in the initial wave.
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Off the charts: What’s the most popular male name in the US, according to data from the 2020 Census released last week? [Answer below]. |
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