Blasting off

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Shoppers being scammed by fake online stores, can a diabetes drug help reduce blindness in later life, how a bad night’s sleep rewires your brain, and get ready to rock with The Guess Who 🎸

Let’s get into it!

It’s pretty easy to fake the look of a boutique retail shop on the internet. Create a backstory for the founder, who’s an elderly lady knitting sweaters with her own two hands to honour the memory of her son who she used to knit sweaters for.

Draw the buyer’s attention with the appearance of authenticity and their sympathy with the appearance of a tragic backstory, and wait for the cash to start flowing.

Countless scams are popping up on social media using this playbook, often impersonating other stores that actually do exist in order to get away with shipping knock-off crap to customers who respond by complaining about the real store rather than the one they got scammed by.

“Sometimes people were receiving products from China and very low-grade jewelry, and then some people weren’t receiving things at all,” said Deanna Newman, who owns a Canadian jewellery boutique called C’est La Vie, and went through the exact nightmare scenario described above.

She ultimately figured out what was going on, and posted social media content proving she and her store were, in fact, real. She clarified that the angry customers had actually been scammed by frauds posing as satellite locations of her store in various cities around the world.

According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in April of last year, 36% of Americans failed to receive a refund after discovering they’d received counterfeit items or simply never received their order.

A study conducted by researchers in the United Kingdom tracked patients 55 and over, many of whom were receiving the diabetes medication Metformin for five years, and analyzed the rates at which they developed age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

AMD is a condition most responsible for blindness in the elderly in developed countries around the world. In the U.K. alone, 10% to 15% of adults 65 and older suffer from intermediate or advanced cases, costing the healthcare system £11.1 billion annually.

The study, published in BMJ Open Ophthalmology, found those over 55 who take metformin for diabetes were 37% less likely to develop AMD over the course of five years than those not on the drug.

Ophthalmologists have previously hypothesized there could be a link between metformin and AMD reduction, but this particular study was the first to draw its conclusion from photographs taken of the patients’ eyes.

"Most people who suffer from AMD have no treatment, so this is a great breakthrough in our search for new treatments,” said Dr. Nick Beare, an eye doctor and the study’s lead researcher. “What we need to do now is test metformin as a treatment for AMD in a clinical trial. Metformin has the potential to save many people's sight."

A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found prolonged poor sleep quality can literally rewire nerve fibers in the brain, resulting in 33% slower communication between neurons.

You’ve likely encountered the slow and groggy experience of being too tired to function normally after a poor night’s sleep or two. The root of this feeling is tied to the delayed transfer of cholesterol to myelin sheaths—the materials that insulate the bundles of nerve fibers which house the pulses fired between neurons.

Without the requisite amount of cholesterol, myelin sheaths become thinner, resulting in the loosening of the white matter lining inside the nerve fibers. The loosening of this material lowers the pressure inside these communication tunnels, causing neuronic impulse transmission to slow down.

In other words, your grogginess in response to not getting enough sleep is basically a reflection of the same thing happening at the cellular level inside your brain.

The researchers say the study shouldn’t serve as a blueprint for treating the symptoms of a chronic sleep deficit, but it should serve as a place to start in looking for ways to do so.

Alexander Venner is but a student at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, but he’s responsible for discovering an exoplanet hidden in a dataset of over 500,000 star systems captured by the Kepler telescope, which NASA retired eight years ago.

Exoplanets are unimaginably far away, but by fixing a telescope’s gaze on a distant star, astronomers can identify when a planet is orbiting it by observing a pattern of dimming in the light the star emits.

This is called the transit method, and despite its inventor hypothesizing there must be millions of exoplanets, even the most meticulous scientists have only discovered about 6,000 of them.

Well, chalk that up to 6,001. Venner combed through Kepler data provided by the Planet Hunters Project, which recruits citizen astronomers to look for cosmic easter eggs NASA may have glossed over. Within the data captured for a K-dwarf star dubbed HD 137010, Venner caught a dimming pattern that was previously undetected.

Why did NASA miss it? Because cooler rocky planets like the one you’re on right now have a weaker dimming signal, and are therefore easy to miss.

Called HD 137010b, collaborators on the study confirmed it’s also one of just a few dozen known planets residing in a star’s habitable zone, begging the question: is there another Alex Venner staring right back at us? 😲

Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings are back on the road after opening their reunion tour on Saturday night in Niagara Falls, Canada.

Widely considered the co-leaders of The Guess Who, Cummings and Bachman have enjoyed great success in their own solo endeavours, and their reunion marks the first time they’re appearing on stage together in two decades.

More importantly, however: they’re getting to do it under the name The Guess Who. The rights to the name were only just returned to them after a lawsuit over the naming and performance rights of the group’s songs ended in their favour.

For decades, an iteration of the band featuring bassist Jim Kale and drummer Gary Peterson toured under the moniker. In 2023, Cummings and Bachman sued based on claims of false advertising, and after Cummings—who holds the primary songwriting credits on the group’s biggest hits—cancelled the performance rights to those songs, the “cover band” was finished.”

In 2024, the lawsuit settled with Cummings and Bachman regaining the band’s name, and over the next several months, The Guess Who will head out on the Takin’ It Back Tour.

Stranger in a strange land

We’ve got another cool theme for you with today’s trivia 🤣 If you know your dystopian movies—those other worldly cinematic masterpieces—than you’ll do just fine!

Complete the game and earn a shot at a $25 eGift Card ;)

Winner will be notified on Thursday afternoon. Keep an eye on your inbox and don’t forget to check your spam folder!*