Sometimes you feel like a nut

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. See what a million bucks gets you in Tuscany, Disney tells TikTok to back off, and get ready for the parade of planets 🪐

Let’s get into it!

After centuries of migrants west to start a life in the promised land of the North America, many families are reverse migrating today, heading back to where their ancestors came from.

The Italian countryside is one of those places, for former Denverite, Vito Andrea Racanelli.

At 47, he brought his wife and two teenage children to a small Tuscan village called Radicondoli. Amazed by the idyllic surroundings and family-like greetings of the villagers, Racanellli—whose ancestors left the Beautiful Country in the 1880s—decided to purchase his former aristocratic farmhouse estate the same day.

“I was tired of spending so much time behind a desk, and my wife and I wanted to spend more time traveling in Europe and simply being outdoors…” he told CNN.

“It began calling later in life once my friends dispersed across the country, my personal interests matured, and my desire to reconnect with my heritage grew.”

For US$1.1 million, the Racanellis got five hectares of land with multiple houses—including the 4,000 sq. ft. one the family currently resides in. The other buildings feature a small cottage with loft bedrooms, a garage attached to the pool house that Vito turned into a gym, and of course, there’s also the pool itself.

There’s plenty more going on with this dream destination if you’re prepared to buy a one-way ticket. You can have a look here.

The Walt Disney Company issued a cease and desist letter the other day to TikTok’s developer and former majority owner, ByteDance, alleging it infringed on Disney’s intellectual property to train the AI-driven video platform, Seedance 2.0.

The letter accuses ByteDance of fostering the creation and distribution of content on Seedance and related platforms "with a pirated library of Disney's copyrighted characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and other Disney franchises, as if Disney's coveted intellectual property were free public domain clip art."

"Over Disney's well-publicized objections, ByteDance is hijacking Disney's characters by reproducing, distributing, and creating derivative works featuring those characters. ByteDance's virtual smash-and-grab of Disney's IP is willful, pervasive, and totally unacceptable," Disney's outside attorney David Singer wrote.

"We believe this is just the tip of the iceberg—which is shocking considering Seedance has only been available for a few days," he added.

Transcendental meditation, which involves the repetitious reciting of a sound or mantra for at least 15 or 20 minutes per day, has been practised for thousands of years.

Its advocates cite benefits ranging from the healthy to the spiritual, and though the latter is a more difficult-to-prove subjective experience, the former may have some scientific backing.

Meditation is known to calm nerves and limit the stress response of humans by regulating various gene systems in ways that can prevent negative health outcomes, including accelerated aging.

Researchers at Maharishi International University in Iowa conducted a study in which they recruited four groups, including two young groups (20-32) and two older groups (55-72). Each cohort contained one group of transcendental meditators and one group that didn’t meditate.

The researchers chose 15 genes associated with stress response, and found 13 were “downregulated” in the young group of meditators compared to the non-meditators, while seven were downgraded in the older group of meditators compared to the control group.

“To summarize the data on reduced gene expression in the [meditation] group, the association of these genes with healthy aging through their roles in controlling inflammation, energy metabolism and mitochondrial function, stability of nuclear DNA, and other key cell functions is clear,” the authors conclude in their paper, published in Biomolecules. “Increased expression of these genes is connected with a number of age-related diseases.”

A parade of the planets will march across the night sky on Feb. 28, starting just 30 minutes after sunset in a rare occurrence that will include six of Earth’s seven closest neighbors.

A planet parade of course isn’t exactly what it sounds like, but refers to an alignment during which at least four or five planets are visible in the night sky at the same time.

The last seven planet parade occurred on Feb. 27 last year, but the last one before that was 25 years ago, and another won’t occur again until 2040. Six-planet parades are basically just as rare, typically only occurring every few decades. We’ve been spoiled recently, however, with one occurring last January, last August, and again in just 11 days.

The fourth rock from the Sun will miss out on the parade on Feb. 28, though Mars is usually among the most visible “stars” in the sky during the summer months. Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune will all join the parade about 30 minutes after sunset during next Saturday, with the first four visible to the naked eye under clear conditions.

Mercury may be difficult to spot, however, given its close proximity to Venus from Earth’s vantage point, and how low to the horizon she tends to sit.

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