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Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. August apartment rents rise for the first time in four years; how shrinkflation works until it doesn’t; and scientists find “ghost” ancestors in modern human DNA.

Let’s get into it!

During the post-pandemic cycle of inflation, prices rose at a pace not seen in 40 years, driving living costs through the roof and putting consumers in a pretty bad mood.

In an effort to create the appearance of slower price growth, many businesses opted for shrinkflation, in which unit volumes were cut and prices stayed the same.

While this is cleverly referred to as shrinkflation, it’s literally just another form of inflation, and businesses were carrying out a highwire act trying to pass things off like they were conscientiously keeping prices stable.

The Weber-Fechner Law states that the smallest change in volume a consumer can notice isn’t a fixed percentage, but a certain proportion of what they started with. In consumer packaged goods, the conventional wisdom is somewhere between 5% and 15%, and though that runs contrary to the Weber-Fechner Law, the point is: any change less than that, and nobody will notice.

…Until they do. And during the 2021-2022 inflation cycle, they did, driving what was probably an unprecedented level of resentment by consumers towards suppliers and grocers themselves.

Shrinkflation wasn’t invented post-COVID, though. Stake covered a story recently that featured a Mars Bar from 1991 next to one from 2026 that was about 40% the size of its ancestor, and 500% more expensive. Nobody noticed until they did.

Ultimately, until it doesn’t, shrinkflation works.

A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests exercising after prolonged sleeplessness may be just as rejuvenating as actually taking a nap.

The study’s authors recruited 54 healthy young adults and had them stay awake for 30 hours in a lab setting. After hour 30, they were divided into three groups: one assigned to a 20-minute cycling session, one assigned to take a 90-minute nap, and the other assigned to nothing as the control group.

They were shown a list of images immediately following their assignment, and then asked to recall as many as they could during a memory test three days later. Both the cycling group and the napping group remembered considerably more than the control group.

Specifically, the authors determined 20-minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise and a 90-minute nap both improve memory recall by 22% three days after not sleeping for 30 consecutive hours.

“Sleep loss affects nearly every aspect of how we think and function, but many people can't simply stop what they're doing and get more sleep,” said senior author Marc Roig, Professor in McGill's School of Physical and Occupational Therapy. “Our findings show that even a brief bout of exercise may help preserve one of our most important cognitive abilities.”

Anthropologists have long known that early humans (homo sapiens) inter-bred with relative species like Neanderthals and Denisovans. However, the DNA of neither species fills the gaps still believed to exist in the evolutionary chain that led to modern human beings.

A study published in the journal Science detailed the back-tracing of the human genome in order to identify what pieces of the puzzle have already been found, and which ones are still out there waiting to be discovered.

The researchers found DNA in modern humans that traces back to two “ghost” ancestors—pieces of the puzzle waiting to be discovered, but which at this point have no presence in the fossil record.

One was likely a species in Africa that inter-bred with humans over 50,000 years ago; the other likely lived around 200,000 years ago, and inter-bred with Denisovans, who in turn passed that DNA onto humans in a mixer of their own.

“The most fundamental question that most of us have is, ‘Why are we here? Where do we come from?’ And these genealogies really allow us to look into the past in a way that we have not been able to do before,” said Priya Moorjani, study coauthor and an associate professor in the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

It would probably come as a shock to very few people that rockstars do what they want, when they want, at their own pace, for whatever reason.

You’d think it would take a real magician to be able to get the Rolling Stones—and specifically, Keith Richards—to follow your lead, but it turns out it just has to be someone prepared to get in their faces and tell them what’s what.

The 35-year-old phenom producer Andrew Watt is that man, according to Ronnie Wood.

Watt produced the band’s 2023 comeback Hackneye Diamonds, along with this year’s Foreign Tongues.

According to Wood, the Stones “need someone to boss us around to say: ‘Come on, you’ve got to come in at eight o’clock, and I want your parts done,’ you know? ‘And then over the next week I want all your guitar parts done, Keith.’”

Unsurprisingly, Keith’s first instinct was “not a chance.” Watt had other plans, though.

“Keith would go: ‘What do you mean? I’ll do them when I want to.’ [Watt] said: ‘No, you won’t. You’ll do them when I tell you. And you’re going to start now.’”

According to Wood, Richards replied: “‘Oh, okay then.’ It takes an unusual man to be able to converse with Keith on something like bossing him around. It’s good.”

Quizmaster’s choice

Well, it’s another Friday, so we’re back with another round of à la carte. The questions may be random, but if you were born in the ’60s, they’ll all land. So go on Staker, have at it, with today’s trivia!