Category: Business Insider

• Kolossal hopes to film a colossal squid in its natural habitat, the waters around Antarctica.
• The squid is large but elusive and difficult to study since it lives thousands of feet underwater.
• Using Antarctic tourist boats made searching for the squid far more cost-effective.

Over the course of four trips, tourists on an Antarctic cruise ship watched researchers lower a camera into the frigid, icy waters of the Southern Ocean. They had the same question every day: "Did you find it yet?"

The scientists were searching for the colossal squid, an evasive cephalopod that can weigh 1,100 pounds. Though fishing boats have found a handful of complete and partial specimens, researchers have had difficulty finding one in the wild.

Matthew Mulrennan hopes to change that with Kolossal, the nonprofit he founded to film a colossal squid in its natural habitat. The goal is to learn basic information about the sea animal, like how it hunts and looks in different life stages.

"I always like to say that it's an oversize poster species for how little we know about the ocean and how little we've explored it," he told Business Insider.

In 2022 and 2023, Mulrennan assembled a team of scientists to attempt to get footage of the squid aboard the Antarctic tourist cruises. Though he estimates the endeavors cost $500,000 in total, it was far cheaper than hiring a research vessel.

The cruise ship holds 200 passengers, each paying upwards of $6,720. While they expected lectures from geologists, marine biologists, and other experts, they didn't necessarily know there would be a full research station aboard.

The team's underwater camera filmed dozens of Antarctic species, including one squid resembling a young colossal.

The enigmatic colossal squid

Measuring about 46 feet with its tentacles spread out, the colossal squid is nevertheless hard to spot.

Adults live over 3,000 feet deep in the waters around Antarctica, putting them beyond the reach of even the most skilled technical divers. Submersible vehicles may scare them off.

Many of the known specimens were found in the stomach of sperm whales, whose diets may be 77 percent colossal squid. Only 12 complete specimens have been found, according to a 2015 study.

"There isn't that much that's known about it because it's so elusive," according to Myrah Graham, a master's student at Memorial University's Marine Institute who accompanied Mulrennan on one of the expeditions.

They're also difficult to preserve for long-term study, and so a lot of the fundamentals about them aren't known, including how old they get, details of their reproduction, and the population size, Graham said.

"The bottom line is we just need to film it, and we can learn a lot off of just brief interactions," he said.

Combining science and tourism

Mulrennan first became interested in colossal squids in 2007 when he was studying abroad at the University of Auckland. Researchers dissected what he called a "monster specimen" captured by a fishing vessel.

Though Mulrennan wasn't involved in the dissection, he was hooked on learning more about the sea animal. In 2015, he made a goal to film the colossal squid within 10 years.

Chartering research vessels can cost tens of thousands of dollars a day. Similar expeditions have cost as much as $8 million, Mulrennan said.

Eventually, Mulrennan hit on the idea of getting on Intrepid Travel's Ocean Endeavor, a cruise ship that would already be traveling to Antarctica.

Once aboard, curious cruise-goers would stop by and watch brittle stars and other deep-sea life captured by an underwater camera. The passengers started referring to the researchers as the "squid heads," Mulrennan said.

"You're getting this kind of privileged access immediately on board, Graham said. "One of the comments I got the most was, 'Oh, I wish I had gone to school for marine biology.'"

In order to accommodate the cruise passengers' itineraries of seeing penguins and seals — what Mulrennan called "air-breathing cuties" — the researchers had to pull all-nighters when the ship was in the deep ocean.

Sometimes the passengers would complain about the smelly toothfish bait the scientists used to lure the squid. The researchers had to be flexible about lowering the underwater camera, especially when the waves churned ice nearby.

Once, the researchers had to take down their whole research station so passengers could use the nearby door for a polar plunge.

"You get 150 half-naked guests walking out doing vodka shots in your research station," Mulrennan said. "It's like bizarre stuff that can't happen on a normal vessel."

The future of the colossal squid search

During 58 days at sea, Kolossal's camera captured over 80 marine species, including giant volcano sponges, dragonfish, icefish, Antarctic sun stars, and — maybe — a colossal squid.

"We're not claiming this is the colossal squid, but it's also not not a colossal squid," Mulrennan said of footage of a translucent squid that the camera filmed.

Based on assessments of experts who have seen the footage, it's impossible to tell whether the animal is a young colossal squid or a full-grown glass squid.

Graham said she thinks it shows they're on the right track.

Mulrennan hopes to return to Antarctica during the next season, just in time for his self-imposed deadline of finding the colossal squid by 2025.

"We're closing in on a hundred years of our interaction with the species," Mulrennan said, "and we still know so little about it."

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• Google is testing AI-generated answers in regular search results.
• The experiments are labeled as "AI overviews" and began about a month ago in the US and the UK.
• Remember when Google's purpose was to compile lists of sites that had the information you want? That was a long time ago.

Sure, you've heard about AI and tech like ChatGPT. An increasing number of you are even trying to use that tech in your everyday life — for fun or school or maybe even work.

For the most part, though, you have to go looking for AI if you want to use it in your daily life. If you want AI-generated results, you need to use the ChatGPT website or app, or click on a specific tab on something like Microsoft's Bing.

Now that's changing, at least for some Google searchers, like me: On Monday morning, using regular old Google, I typed in "truman doctrine vietnam war" and got back an "AI overview" — not something Google found on another site, but something it wrote itself.

I haven't spent a lot of time reading up on US foreign policy post-WWII recently — that's why I asked Google — but I think it was a pretty good answer, actually?

Much more interesting than the answer, though, was how Google came up with it.

I knew that Google was scrambling to catch up in the AI product wars, and was worried about the fate of its core search product in a world where there would be no need to generate links to websites with information — that an AI engine would simply generate the answers you need. And I knew that Google was working on an AI-powered version of search, which you could experiment with yourself.

But I didn't know that Google had started putting this stuff out there for normals, mixed in there with every other search result.

Turns out they have, for about a month. And it may or may not be telling that Google didn't make a big announcement about this — so far, the only place I can find on the web that knows about it is this update from trade journal Search Engine Land.

The upshot: For now, Google is testing out self-generated "AI overviews" for some regular search queries where it thinks the answer might be complex (but answerable). A Google rep told me the AI answers have been deployed in a "very limited percentage of search traffic" in the US and the UK.

And I shouldn't be that surprised, really: Ever since OpenAI started blowing people's minds with ChatGPT in the fall of late 2022, it was clear this tech was coming to search — that was the whole point of Microsoft's big partnership with OpenAI that brought the tech to Bing.

But it's one thing to know that and another to start seeing it in the wild. And to start seeing it as a normal result as opposed to something special.

Google does seem to be handling this well, and addressing lots of the obvious issues that Google-written answers will raise in search.

For instance, it clearly labels the results as AI-generated, and experimental. And a "learn more" link brings you to this well-written explainer that says things like "Generative AI is not a human being. It can't think for itself or feel emotions. It's just great at finding patterns." (And, lower down, "Because generative AI is experimental and a work in progress, it can and will make mistakes.")

And Google also shows its work: If you click on a button in the result, it will surface links to helpful, relevant sites like the National Archives.

Because I am A Responsible Journalist, I also asked Google how Google Magi, which powers these results, does or doesn't interact with the tech powering Google Gemini, its much-maligned "woke AI" chatbot. I didn't get much of a satisfying answer, other than that Google would like you to think of them as separate products.

I'm happy to let other people worry about Google's wokeness (You do hear a lot less hollering about this now, don't you?), though. I am more interested in how these kinds of answers will accelerate the way we already use Google — as a one-stop answers shop, instead of a place that helps you find another place that has your answers.

That trend has been well-documented for years and revolves around Google deciding it would rather have you hang out on Google — through one of its "knowledge panels" or something similar — than go somewhere else to get an answer. Even though Google's business model revolves around selling links to somewhere else.

Right now, Google tries to keep you on Google by surfacing text from a site that purports to answer your query. In theory, if you want to learn more, you can click through. But often, Google's excerpt gives you no incentive to click through. You've got what you need. You're done.

(Meanwhile, I can think of many cases where the information Google cites in the text snippets is wrong — at least in part because Google is relying on highly-ranked web pages whose main purpose isn't to be accurate but to be highly-ranked by Google. Ask Google "What is Jason Kelce's net worth," for instance, and it will highlight a (not remotely helpful) answer from a debit card site that also offers search-bait about Taylor Swift's cat.)

And once you start imagining Google providing fully AI-generated answers like this all the time, with all kinds of queries, things get really interesting.

On the one hand, maybe Google becomes even more valuable because you're no longer even pretending it's a "search engine" — it's just an answer machine. And you go there because you're used to going there.

On the other hand: In that scenario, Google certainly won't be the only answer machine. Which means the whole empire, and the many businesses that depend on the empire (like, um, digital publishers?) goes up for grabs.

You can see why Google is testing this stuff carefully and quietly — and also why it needs to figure out the answer, fast.

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• Tesla laid off over 10% of its workforce on Sunday night.
• Some factory employees only realized they were laid off when their badges didn't work, sources told BI.
• At the Nevada factory, the process of weeding out laid-off staff in line to enter caused around a 2-hour backup, one source said.

Tesla told staff it was laying off more than 10% of its workforce on Sunday night, but some workers didn't realize they were laid off until they showed up at the company's facilities, five current or former workers told Business Insider.

The cuts impacted engineers and production associates alike. At Tesla's factory in Sparks, Nevada, workers faced about a two-hour line Monday morning in order to get into the facility as a result of badge checks, one worker said.

At the factory, the security team was scanning the badges of workers coming out of the shuttles that ferry people between the factory and nearby parking lots, said two current Tesla workers who requested anonymity since they weren't authorized to speak about the matter. Typically, security guards inspect workers' badges at the site, but don't usually scan them directly, the two workers said. On Monday morning, the officials picked out the workers who had been laid off and sent them back on separate vans, the two workers said.

Three other former Tesla employees said workers at the Fremont factory were told by security that if their badges didn't work they were no longer employed.

Tesla employees who were terminated received notice via their personal emails on Sunday night and their access to Tesla systems was revoked, four workers said. The company-wide email that Elon Musk sent announcing the cuts was delivered shortly before midnight on Sunday, according to a timestamp on the memo viewed by BI.

"We have done a thorough review of the organization and made the difficult decision to reduce our headcount globally. Unfortunately as a result, your position has been eliminated by this restructuring," a separate email notifying impacted employees they'd been laid off reads, according to a copy viewed by Business Insider.

The email sent directly to laid-off staff said the cuts would be effective immediately and workers would receive information regarding their severance within 48 hours.

The same day Tesla announced layoffs at least two executives resigned from the company. SVP of powertrain and electrical engineering Drew Baglino and VP of public policy and business development Rohan Patel said on X they had left Tesla as of Sunday.

A spokesperson for Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. Ahead of the layoffs, Tesla employed over 140,000 workers globally, including over 3,000 at its factory in Nevada.

Tesla workers aren't the first to unceremoniously discover they've been terminated while trying to access their former place of work. Last year, some former Google employees told BI they learned they'd been laid off when they couldn't badge into the office.

Do you work for Tesla or have a tip? Reach out to the reporter via a non-work email at gkay@businessinsider.com

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• Monday is the first day of Donald Trump's criminal hush-money trial. 
• During pretrial arguments, his campaign texted supporters saying he "could be locked up for life."
• Legal experts have said it's unlikely Trump will spend any time behind bars if convicted.

As the first day of Donald Trump's criminal hush-money trial got underway in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday, the former president's reelection campaign blasted out a text message to supporters saying that he "could be locked up for life."

However, legal experts have previously told Business Insider that the chances of Trump spending any time behind bars if he is convicted in the case are slim to none.

During a court lunch break Monday, Trump's team sent out an "emergency memo" to supporters alerting them, "THIS IS NOT AMERICA! MY TRIAL JUST STARTED…"

"I'm going to be honest with you," the message read, "I don't know what will happen. I could be locked up for life."

The message continued, "THEY HAVE NO CASE, but they're still taking me to court. Right now, I need your support more than ever."

Backers are asked in the memo to send a "message of support" to Trump.

"I'm going to try to read all of your responses before I go to bed tonight," the text says. "This message doesn't have to be long, but it would be really nice to hear from you. PLEASE RESPOND."

At the end of the message, supporters were encouraged to donate money to Trump's reelection campaign.

Trump's first criminal trial was to kick off Monday with jury selection after a morning of final pretrial arguments.

Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Prosecutors accuse him of lying on documents to disguise hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress.

Prosecutors say Trump's ex-personal attorney and former fixer, Michael Cohen, facilitated $130,000 in payments to Daniels just days before the 2016 presidential election to buy her silence over a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump. Trump has denied the charges.

Legal experts have told BI that first-offenders virtually never go to jail for the kind of non-violent, low-level felonies that Trump faces.

But Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg can still seek to lock Trump up if he is convicted, the experts told BI, given that each count of felony falsifying of business records allows up to a maximum of four years in prison.

Prosecutors can also ask for more likely penalties — including a hefty fine, community service, and probation — in the event that the 77-year-old former president is convicted.

Before Trump headed into the courtroom on Monday morning, he called the case against him "political persecution."

"This is an assault on America," he said. "Nothing like this has ever happened before, there's never been anything like it."

The hush-money case is the first of Trump's four criminal cases to go to trial before the 2024 election, where Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee against President Joe Biden.

The trial is expected to last six weeks.

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• Associate Justice Clarence Thomas on Monday was absent from oral arguments without explanation.
• John Roberts said Thomas would take part in the day's cases via transcripts and briefs, per The AP.
• Thomas, 75, is the eldest member of the court and a key member of its influential conservative bloc.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas on Monday was absent from oral arguments and the court didn't offer an explanation as to why he wouldn't be present.

After the court sat for arguments in the morning, Chief Justice John Roberts said Thomas would be absent and would take part in cases through transcripts and briefs, according to The Associated Press.

Thomas, 75, did not take part in arguments remotely, an option that justices sometimes use when they're sick or are unable to physically come to the Supreme Court building, per the report.

Business Insider has reached out to the Supreme Court for comment.

In 2022, Thomas was hospitalized with an infection after he experienced "flu-like symptoms."

Thomas is the longest-tenured associate justice on the court, having been nominated in 1991 by then-President George H.W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate later that year.

With the appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Thomas has also seen his judicial influence catapult as the eldest member of the court's six-member conservative bloc.

Last year, ProPublica first reported that Thomas had taken luxury vacations funded by the billionaire real estate developer Harlan Crow for more than 20 years without disclosing the trips.

In response, Thomas said at the time that he was advised that it wasn't necessary to report "this sort of personal hospitality."

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• McDonald's is bringing back bagel breakfast sandwiches to California restaurants.
• The popular menu item, plus a $15 million ad buy, could boost sales by 10%, according to Bloomberg.
• Franchisees have said price increases alone won't cover the cost of California's new fast food wage.

California's newly enacted fast food wage hike is already having an effect, though not one lawmakers likely had in mind when writing the law: bagels are back at McDonald's in the state.

The Golden Arches brought the popular menu item back to Golden State restaurants earlier this year as one of several levers the company is pulling to drive sales and offset the cost of the pay increase.

A group of franchisees and corporate employees, known as the "Rise and Dominate" team, proposed the idea of reintroducing bagel sandwiches to the state along with a $15 million ad blitz to boost traffic and digital sales, Bloomberg reported.

McDonald's told Business Insider that the team's recommendations were based on best practices from other locations where restaurant operators have had to navigate local wage hikes.

The move could give a financial lift to franchise owners who have complained that the new $20 per hour wage is unfairly squeezing their profit margins.

Scott Rodrick, who owns 18 McDonald's locations in the state, told Business Insider he's already raised menu prices between 5% and 7% since January, but there is a limit to the prices his customers will pay.

Kerri Harper-Howie, who owns 21 McDonald's restaurants in California with her sister, told KTLA News that "the truth of the matter is you can't raise prices enough" to offset the wage increase.

The return of bagels to the breakfast menu — along with a few other moves — could boost top-line sales by 10%, Bloomberg reported, while a higher proportion of digital sales would mean better profitability as well.

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• President Joe Biden began his presidency with a 57% approval rating, according to Gallup.
• It's been on a mostly downwards trajectory ever since.
• Biden's not alone: Many presidents' approval ratings decrease over time.

President Joe Biden entered the White House in January 2021 with a 57% approval rating. Unfortunately for him, his popularity has never passed that mark, and it's been mostly downhill for his approval rating in the years since.

Examining Biden's approval rating as he approaches the end of his four years as president, it's difficult to say with certainty which, if any, events directly correlated with his slide in popularity.

Even when major events in his presidency have occurred under his leadership, there haven't been notable spikes or falls tied to them, with one possible exception: the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.

The president's approval rating began to drop steeply around June 2021, a few months into the US withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

Biden was heavily criticized for the withdrawal, though it largely followed a deal President Donald Trump made with the Taliban in 2020.

Biden's approval rating first dropped below 50% support in Gallup's August 2021 survey, the same month the withdrawal violently ended.

The lowest Biden's approval rating fell to in the first half of his presidency was 38% in July 2022, around a month after gas prices spiked to over $5 a gallon.

His approval rating didn't stay there for long. A month later, in August, it shot back up to 44% when he signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law.

Compared to past presidents

It's not uncommon for the approval rating of US presidents to drop throughout their time in office.

Former President George W. Bush experienced a tremendous spike in approval — jumping from around mid-50% approval to over 80% — after the September 11 terrorist attacks. But by the time he left office, his approval ratings were below 40%.

Former President Barack Obama ended his presidency with a slightly lower approval rating than he had when he took office.

Trump began his time in the White House with an approval rating of just over 40%. For the most part, his popularity actually slowly increased during his one term in office. His election denialism and the January 6 riots at the Capitol appear to have impacted polling respondents, and in his final month in office his approval rating dropped below 40%.

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• Lauren Boebert just had her worst fundraising quarter in years.
• She's facing a tough primary and accusations of carpetbagging after moving to a redder district.
• But some of her House GOP colleagues are donating to her. George Santos even gave her $400.

Rep. Lauren Boebert just had her worst fundraising quarter in years, bringing in roughly $462,000 in the first three months of 2024.

It was the Colorado Republican's first full quarter since she announced in late December that she would be switching congressional districts. After winning by less than 600 votes in 2022, Boebert moved across the state to run in a more conservative district vacated by Rep. Ken Buck.

To put Boebert's poor fundraising quarter into perspective: It was a significant drop from the roughly $540,000 that she raised in the last 3 months of 2023, and far below the nearly $764,000 haul that she brought in this time last year. In 2021 and 2022, she had several quarters where she raised between $800,000 and $1 million.

Boebert's campaign filings show that she's continued to receive financial support from her Freedom Caucus colleagues since switching districts, including donations ranging between $1,000 and $3,300 from campaign accounts tied to Reps. Mary Miller of Illinois, Ronny Jackson of Texas, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Andy Biggs of Arizona.

She also received a $400 personal donation from George Santos, the scandal-plagued ex-lawmaker who was expelled from the House in December and has since been making a living off of Cameo videos.

Before he resigned his seat, Buck quipped that Boebert made Santos "look like a saint."

While former President Donald Trump and House GOP leadership have endorsed Boebert, she faces a tough race in her new district.

She has been dogged during the campaign by accusations of "carpetbagging," referring to instances when politicians run for offices far from where they live for political advantage.

Several GOP establishment figures have lined up behind Jerry Sonnenberg, a former state lawmaker who has emphasized his low-key style over Boebert's bombast.

The congresswoman has also faced numerous personal scandals in the last year, the most prominent incident being her ejection from a musical production of "Beetlejuice" in a Denver theatre in September.

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• Leafhoppers are the only species that secrete brochosomes: rare nanoparticles with invisibility properties.
• But for the first time, a group of scientists has created their own synthetic brochosomes.
• They hope their brochosomes will one day be used for invisible cloaking devices and other technologies.

We tend to think of invisibility cloaks as science fiction. But one group of scientists has taken a big step toward making them a reality.

For the first time, scientists at Pennsylvania State University have created synthetic replicas of brochosomes, naturally occurring nanoparticles that could one day be used to make invisibility cloaking devices.

Invisibility cloaking isn't the only application for synthetic brochosomes. In the next few years, they could find their way into a range of commercial applications — from solar energy to pharmaceuticals, according to lead investigator Tak Sing Wong, professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering at Penn State.

Solving a 70-year-long geometric mystery

Brochosomes are bucky-ball-shaped, hollow nanoparticles covered in holes — known as through-holes — that go all the way through them. This complex structure allows them to absorb or scatter certain wavelengths of light, depending on the size of the brochosome and its holes.

The only place in the world where you can find naturally occurring brochosomes is on the back of a leafhopper — a common backyard insect. Their brochosome coats were first discovered in the 1950s, and they probably help them blend into their surroundings.

Scientists aren't sure why leafhoppers secrete and cover themselves in brochosomes. Until now, they didn't even understand the purpose of the nanoparticles' intricate geometry.

"This is really the first study to understand how the brochosome's complex geometry interacts with light," Wong said.

To reach that understanding, Wong and his colleagues had to figure out how to make a replica of a brochosome. After almost a decade of research, they managed to 3D print the world's first synthetic brochosomes.

The invisibility properties of brochosomes

There are two important elements of brochosome geometry: the diameter of the particle, and the diameter of its through-holes.

If a wavelength of light is the same length as the diameter of the brochosomes, it will be scattered in all directions when it hits the particle. But if the wavelength of light is the same length as the diameter of the brochosomes' through-holes, it will pass through the particle and get absorbed by it.

This absorption coupled with light-scattering means that brochosomes have very limited light reflection — and can be invisible over certain electromagnetic ranges. Covering an object in them could, in theory, work as an invisibility cloak.

The beauty of synthetic brochosomes is that they could be made at different sizes, and thus tailored to absorb and scatter different wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum. That means that engineers can customize brochosomes for specific functions, such as invisibility to infrared radiation to help with military defense.

In fact, Wong's brochosomes are the right size to do that. They're about 40 to 50 times larger than naturally occurring ones, and they only interact with infrared radiation. Wong's future research will partly focus on making smaller synthetic brochosomes to target the shorter end of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The commercial potential of brochosomes

Although Wong's synthetic brochosomes mark a major step towards invisibility-cloaking technology, scientists are still decades away from bringing anything to market.

"I think in my lifetime, it's possible," said Hao Xin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the study. It will take at least 50 years, he said.

But in just three to five years, Wong hopes to produce brochosomes on a large enough scale to use them in pigments, pharmaceuticals, and solar panels.

For example, titanium oxide, a white pigment that's used in everything from candy to sunscreen, was recently banned as a food additive by the European Union. Wong believes that brochosomes could eventually replace titanium oxide in foods like candy and coffee creamers.

"Depending on our imagination, I think there are many cool applications that can come out of brochosomes," Wong said.

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The Stickney Water Reclamation Plant in Illinois is one of the largest wastewater-treatment facilities in the world, serving about 2.3 million people and cleaning an average of 700 million gallons of wastewater a day. During rainfall, the facility can handle a whopping 1.44 billion gallons of wastewater in a single day — that's a million gallons every minute.

The clean water is released into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, and the sludge that is removed from the water is converted to biosolids, which are a sustainable alternative to chemical fertilizers.

For more, visit: mwrd.org/what-we-do

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