Riding the rails

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today: Americans are less and less interested in buying new cars; All about Istanbul’s most famous hotel; and all about a planet whose clouds are like rocks!

Let’s get into it!

If the Orient Express was a stationary building, it would probably be the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district. In fact, it was initially built to host passengers of the renowned luxury train, and rumour has it that Agatha Christie wrote one of her most famous mysteries, Murder on the Orient Express, while staying at the hotel.

The six-storey building has a Neoclassical exterior and a warm and luxurious interior, with Ottoman history and culture lining the walls and ceilings, and soft-lit chandeliers exuding a warm ambience that’s drawn international dignitaries, movie stars, spies, and artists for 136 years.

“This is the elevator that our founding father Mustafa Kemal has used, Agatha Christie has used, Alfred Hitchcock has used,” Ezgi Pek, the hotel’s marketing coordinator, told CNN Travel’s writers while they made their way through the historic elevator shaft, banquet aboard and all. .

The hotel was at the center of the Allied occupation after the Ottomans were defeated in World War 1. In fact, it served as their HQ from 1917 and 1923, shortly before the Ottoman Empire became the Turkish Republic, and the Rumi calendar was abandoned for the Western Gregorian.

On New Year’s Eve two years later, the Grand Pera Ballroom hosted a party so extravagant, it began in 1341 (Rumi) and ended in 1926 (Gregorian).

About 98% of Meta’s Q1 revenue came from selling advertising space on its various products, making it unlikely the company will ever be able to scale a second line of business equally important to its bottom line.

Still, founder Mark Zuckerberg has been trying for over a decade to deleverage his empire from the advertising business and the company announced last week that it’s going to be testing two subscription services for its Meta AI site to compete with Claude and ChatGPT.

Analysts expect subscription fees will generate $3 billion annually to start, and $16 billion by 2030.

In other words, they’ll start by generating revenues as large as the GDPs of small countries, and still only account for 1.5% of Meta’s annual revenue.

Will it succeed? According to Max Willens, an analyst at Emarketer, “it can be very hard for a corporate parent to sustain enthusiasm for something that is naturally going to be much smaller, likely forever.”

Kristy Ellmer is the Managing Director of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), along with the head of BCG’s transformation practice and cofounder of its Behavioral Science Lab. She knows a thing or two about adjusting her state of mind and her actions in order to pursue and achieve a goal with a razor-sharp, singular focus.

Her resume speaks for itself, and though she likely had the tools to achieve greatness already, it was committing to climbing the vertical height of Mount Everest that forced her to utilize those tools.

The event was called 29029, which took place in Jackson Hole, and it involved scaling a smaller mountain, descending it, and scaling it again—19 times. A more daunting task is difficult to imagine, notwithstanding a climb of the actual Mt. Everest.

So had did she train for it?

For starters, she learned to write down everything she planned to do and when to do it. Sticking to the written word of her mighty soul was not an option—it was a covenant.

She also trained her mind to only focus on the training exercise at hand, or the very next one—never the end goal. Like climbing a mountain itself, you must take one step at a time, and that’s what she did.

Moving mountains takes a lifetime, but climbing them takes a few days. You can do it too, if you want.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University teamed with NASA to leverage the magic of the James Webb Space Telescope and analyze the composition of a gas giant 700 lightyears away.

WASP-94A b is a hot gas giant, in that it orbits extremely close to its star; in this case, closer than Mercury orbits the Sun. The researchers observed the planet transiting its star multiple times, specifically analyzing its leading edge and trailing edge as it began and finished each pass, respectively.

They determined it was morning on the planet’s leading edge as it began each transit, and evening on the trailing edge as it finished. They also determined a hard-to-believe characteristic of its clouds: they’re made of magnesium silicate, a mineral found in rocks.

“I’ve been looking at exoplanets for 20 years, and general cloudiness has been a thorn in our side. We’ve known for quite a while that clouds are pervasive on Hot Jupiter planets, which is annoying because it’s like trying to look at the planet through a foggy window,” David Sing, professor of earth and planetary sciences at Johns Hopkins.

“Not only have we been able to clear the view, but we can finally pin down what the clouds are made out of and how they’re condensing and evaporating as they move around the planet.”

Not like the other

We’re back with another round of odd one out, Staker. We’ll be quizzin’ you on TV characters, themes, stars and shows with today’s trivia! Just pick the one that doesn’t belong, and you’ll be on your way 😏