Good Morning! 🌞

It’s Sunday again. April 6. If the past week wore you down or flew right by, today’s a chance to reset before jumping into another round.

Take a moment. Tidy up, check in with yourself, and make space for whatever matters most right now.

Here’s your Sunday roundup—quick reads, useful ideas, and a little something to keep you steady for the week ahead.

Innovation

A New Way of Making Steel

Boston Metal, a pioneering startup spun out of MIT, is revolutionizing steel production with a technology that replaces carbon-intensive blast furnaces with electricity. The company’s breakthrough method, called molten oxide electrolysis (MOE), uses an electric current to extract iron from ore, producing oxygen instead of carbon dioxide. If powered by renewable or nuclear energy, this process could enable truly carbon-neutral steelmaking—a major step forward in the decarbonization of heavy industry.

Steel manufacturing is responsible for roughly 3 billion tons of CO2 emissions annually, making it one of the most polluting sectors globally. Unlike traditional blast furnaces that burn coke—a coal-derived fuel—to reduce iron ore, Boston Metal’s MOE process avoids fossil fuels altogether. This innovation addresses a critical challenge in cutting emissions from foundational materials like steel and concrete that are essential to modern infrastructure.

Founded in 2013, Boston Metal is working to commercialize and scale MOE for industrial use. Currently, its facility produces one ton of steel per month, but plans are underway for a demonstration plant capable of producing one ton per day by late 2026, with operations set to begin in 2027. While the process demands significant electrical energy, nuclear power is emerging as a strong candidate to supply the clean, consistent energy needed at scale. If successful, Boston Metal intends to license its technology to global manufacturers, potentially reshaping the steel industry for a low-carbon future.

Good News

Hidden $1M Ticket

A man in Wales unknowingly carried a EuroMillions-winning ticket in his car for over four months—so battered and crumpled that it couldn't be scanned. Darren Burfitt, 44, from Swansea, finally checked the ticket when his four-year-old son asked for some chips. “I didn’t want to open a new bag,” Darren explained. “He often ends up with half-open bags, and I knew there was a packet which he hadn’t finished in the car, so I told him I would pop out and get that one for him.” While grabbing the snack, he decided to scan his National Lottery tickets too.

Despite months of family and friends urging him to check, Darren—who works as a greenskeeper at Langland Bay Golf Club—had left the tickets sitting in the console of his car. “I decided to grab my National Lottery tickets at the same time, and started to scan each one on the lottery app on my phone,” he said. One ticket showed a small win of nearly five dollars, but another was so damaged it wouldn’t scan. “It was so crumpled it wouldn’t scan, so I had to bring up the draw details and read the results.” That’s when he realized he had won a life-changing amount. “I couldn’t quite believe it…. In fact, I still cannot believe it now. I just kept looking at the date and then the matching Millionaire Maker code – and then the date and the code again. I just could not comprehend what I was seeing.”

The lucky ticket had been sitting in Darren’s unlocked, mud-covered car all that time. “My car is honestly a shed on wheels, held together with mud. It has almost no value, so I never bother to lock it! I dread to think what could have happened to that winning ticket.” His wife Gemma was away when he found out. “When I called Gemma, my voice was shaking so much, she was convinced something had happened to one of the children.” Now, with a six-year-old daughter and four-year-old son, the couple plans to buy their first home and upgrade to a new pick-up truck. “The kids will love the pick-up and it will enable us to go on even more adventures as a family.” Gemma added, “I literally have to keep pinching myself. Thinking it is a dream which I will wake up from. It changes everything, and we can finally buy a home of our own. It is going to give us so much security for our future and our children’s future.” The story comes just as a EuroMillions jackpot made international headlines, with an Austrian man winning a staggering £209 million ($250M) from a single $10 ticket.

Environment

Pretending to Be Caterpillars

When Jay Falk and Scott Taylor came across a white-necked Jacobin hummingbird chick in Panama’s Soberanía National Park, they didn’t recognize the species at first. The tiny, day-old chick—smaller than a pinky finger—was covered in brown fuzz and exhibited an odd behavior: twitching and shaking its head. This reaction was unfamiliar to the researchers, who were surprised by the display. It wasn’t until later that they hypothesized the chick might be mimicking a poisonous caterpillar native to the region—a defense mechanism never before documented in hummingbirds. In a paper published March 17 in Ecology, Taylor and his team introduced this potential example of mimicry in a hummingbird species.

Falk, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder, noted that there’s still much to learn about the behavior of tropical nesting birds. The dense and dangerous rainforest is home to many predators—snakes, monkeys, birds, and insects—that pose serious threats to vulnerable chicks. Discovering how such delicate creatures survive in this environment has long been a mystery. Though Falk had seen adult white-necked Jacobins at feeders before, he’d never encountered a nest until last March, when a female was spotted incubating an egg near a trail. Her nest was expertly camouflaged, blending into the surroundings with natural materials. When the chick hatched, its brown feathering matched the nest material—an unusual trait for a species whose chicks are typically born featherless.

As the researchers observed the chick over the following days, its mimicry became even more compelling. On the second day after hatching, while the mother was away, a wasp approached the nest. The chick responded by twitching and shaking its head, prompting the wasp to flee. This reaction reminded Falk and Taylor of another tropical bird—the cinereous mourner—which mimics toxic caterpillars through similar movements. In this region of Panama, many caterpillars have brown stinging hairs and also shake their heads to deter predators. This behavior aligns with Batesian mimicry, in which a harmless species imitates a dangerous one to avoid predation—like how milk snakes mimic venomous coral snakes. Although this is just one observation, the researchers plan to test their theory with artificial chicks to study predator response and are encouraging birdwatchers to help document more nests.

(Source: Science writer Yvaine Ye / University of Colorado Boulder)

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When you need me, you throw me away. When you're done with me, you take me back. What am I?

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I show you worlds both far and near, In colors bright, or sometimes unclear. You watch me for stories, laughs, and news, But I don't move — I just give you views. What am I? —TV, Chris Hostetler got this correct early 🌞 

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