Happy Friday!
MESSI SAYS GOODBYE TO ARGENTINA WITH A GOAL AND TWO ASSISTS
Lionel Messi played his 208th and final game for Argentina on Tuesday, and his version of a goodbye was personally touching all three goals in a 3-0 win over Benin. He swung in the corner Nicolás Otamendi headed home in the 48th, set up Nico Paz in the 61st, then buried a left-foot penalty into the roof of the net in the 71st. That was career goal 126, in front of 85,000 at the Monumental, with fireworks and a drone show, because a handshake and a plaque apparently would not do. He is 39 and played the full 90. He also led the match with nine shots and five on target, and hit the post late while chasing a fourth. Benin flew to Buenos Aires for a farewell and spent two hours as the piñata. Their coach, Gernot Rohr, said afterward he was deeply disappointed with how his squad was treated. Messi leaves holding both records that matter in Argentina, 208 caps and 126 goals, along with the 2022 World Cup and two Copa Américas. Twenty-one years ago he came on as a sub against Hungary and got sent off almost immediately. Tuesday he got a solitary lap of the field and 85,000 people chanting his name.
SCIENTISTS OPENED A 194-YEAR-OLD TORTOISE'S MOUTH, THEN STOLE HIS DNA
Jonathan the Aldabra giant tortoise hatched around 1832, arrived on St. Helena in 1882 as a gift to the British governor, and has been loitering at Plantation House ever since. On Wednesday his genome and epigenome went up in Science Advances, the first time anyone has read a giant tortoise's epigenome. He got picked partly because he kept receipts: other Aldabras have been claimed to be this old, but Jonathan has the paperwork. Nobody was letting a team draw blood from a 194-year-old national treasure, so they went with cheek scrapings and saliva, teasing him with food until he opened his jaws. The DNA came back short and contaminated with bacteria. COVID stalled the project. They patched the gaps with DNA from a younger tortoise, which leaves the published sequence about 95 percent Jonathan and 5 percent some other guy. What they got: 287 gene variants unique to him, sitting in DNA repair, insulin regulation, telomere and mitochondrial pathways. The epigenome was the better find. Co-lead author Benjamin Vaisvil calls the genome a cookbook and the epigenome the handwritten notes in the margins, which smear as the book ages. Most of Jonathan's notes are unreadable. The ones controlling his mitochondrial genes are tidier than every tortoise they tested except a five-year-old. It's one animal and it's observational, so hold the supplement order. Jonathan is also blind, has no sense of smell, and in April survived a hoax announcing his death that pulled nearly two million views.
Sources (3)
- bilyonaryo.com - A 194-year-old tortoise, world's oldest land animal, may hold clues to longer life
- news.vumc.org - An extremely old giant tortoise named Jonathan may hold the secret to a long, healthy life: Study
- science.org - Epigenetic insights into extreme longevity in the world's oldest terrestrial animal, Jonathan
OPENAI'S REVENUE IS $18 BILLION SMALLER THAN EVERYONE THOUGHT
OpenAI told investors it hit roughly $50 billion in annualized revenue at the end of September, lower than the $68 billion figure that got passed around all last month. The Financial Times reported it first and CNBC confirmed it, and then the chip sector got walked outside and dealt with. Nvidia fell 3%, Oracle 6% and CoreWeave 8% intraday Thursday, with AMD down 4%, Broadcom 4%, Intel 5% and Super Micro nearly 5%. The Nasdaq closed down 1.25%. Seven public companies, none of whom were in the room, repriced off one private company's slide deck. That is the AI trade now. The explanation came from an anonymous source, not OpenAI. That person said the $68 billion figure included gross revenue from OpenAI's partners, which made for a tidier comparison against Anthropic, since Anthropic counts sales through cloud partners like AWS and Google Cloud and OpenAI doesn't. So a number nobody will put their name on explains the number that moved billions in market cap. The same deck touted 77% run rate growth in the third quarter and 107% for enterprise, which is enormous, and also exactly what you put on the next slide. OpenAI is still carrying an $852 billion valuation into an expected IPO, plus early talks on a round that could raise around $30 billion. CFO Sarah Friar said last week the company is still "very well capitalized."
GUY ARRESTED BACKSTAGE AT DISNEY
Orange County deputies say 37-year-old Michael Byrne of Lakeland spent August messaging a Snapchat user who said he was a 13-year-old boy in Orlando. That user was an undercover detective. Byrne allegedly asked whether he could send something "spicy," then sent one explicit image and three videos and asked for pictures back. Investigators got records from Snapchat and Verizon that they say tied the account to his phone number, his birthdate and his Lakeland address. Then comes the part nobody has explained. Deputies did not pick him up at home. They picked him up at 751 Backstage Lane, the restricted service area behind EPCOT where paying guests cannot go. Disney's full comment was that he is not an employee. That answers one question and completely ignores the louder one, which is how a man with no job there got through a gate that stops families who paid 190 bucks a head. He is charged with solicitation of a minor via computer, transmission of harmful material to minors, and unlawful use of a two-way communication device. Florida law does not require a real child for those counts, so the fake 13-year-old being a grown deputy does not help him. Byrne reportedly told detectives the account was his but said he had no idea he was talking to a 13-year-old, despite the age being right there in the messages.
AN ENGINEER BUILT A WEBSITE WHERE YOU CAN SIT AT ELIZABETH HOLMES' DESK
An engineer named Bo Lau built a website that sits you down at Elizabeth Holmes' desk circa 2016, back when Theranos was worth billions and the blood machine only worked if nobody watched. You can open her MacBook Air, scroll her iPhone and run a simulated Edison, with more than 1,000 emails, texts, slides and court documents from United States v. Elizabeth Holmes loaded in. The period detail is where it gets uncomfortable. The phone has a home button, you swipe across the screen to get in, and the laptop is running OS X El Capitan. It is a museum exhibit for a crime scene that mostly consisted of PowerPoints. Then comes the heel turn. Lau works at Extend, and the whole thing promotes a watch party the company is hosting for Nathan Fielder's upcoming Holmes documentary, "You Can See Everything," plus Extend's own document-parsing software. A startup built a monument to the most famous fraud in Silicon Valley history to move units of a PDF tool. Holmes would respect the hustle. The annoying part is that it genuinely works. Clicking around a fake 2016 desktop is an easier way through the trial record than digging thousands of separate files out of court websites.
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