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Good morning. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and a relaxing long weekend. Today is National Bartender Appreciation Day, and to celebrate, here’s a compilation of bartender fails. There’s a lot to catch up on since I’ve been gone, so buckle up and enjoy today’s newsletter.

International

Tensions rise in South Korea after martial law declaration

Citizens and politicians are reeling after the President tried to stop a political deadlock. South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol faced parliamentary moves to impeach him after abruptly declaring martial law, sending heavily armed forces to Seoul.

It was the first time martial law had been declared in the country since 1979, and following a swift decision by the National Assembly to invalidate the declaration, the President formally withdrew the order early on Wednesday local time.

Decisive declaration

Yoon's declaration established temporary military rule, prohibiting labor strikes and political activity as well as giving the government total control of the media. Those who broke these conditions would be immediately arrested, with no warrant necessary.

• Although there were no reports of violence, military police responded to the thousands of protesters that gathered around the National Assembly throughout the night.

Almost six hours after martial law began, parliament unanimously voted (150-0) to cancel Yoon’s declaration. Only a few hours later, opposition parties then submitted an impeachment motion.

Could Yoon be impeached? At least six of the nine justices of the Constitutional Court and two-thirds of the National Assembly must agree to remove Yoon from office (see overview).

• The 300-seat parliament is controlled by the liberal opposition Democratic Party, which has demanded Yoon's resignation.

It might be sooner than you think: Democratic Party legislator Kim Yong-min stated that a vote on the impeachment motion could even happen today.

Science & Exploration

Researchers discovered a new human species

These fossils might shed light on a piece of human evolution. Researchers claimed to have discovered an ancient new species of human, called Homo juluensis, meaning “big head”, that once lived in eastern Asia between 50,000 and 300,000 years ago.

Big-headed humans

The study, published in Nature Communications, says the extinct humans probably made stone tools, hunted wild horses, and even processed animal hides to get through the bitterly cold winters.

• Their brains were much larger than our species, as well as any hominin of their time.

The findings in the study also pointed to a mysterious population known as the Denisovans, which may have been a subgroup of Homo juluensis, and have proven to evade scientists for years.

However, this discovery could provide important context into how humans may have evolved in the region:

• Modern humans share around 6% of their DNA with the Denisovans but only a few remnants of them have been found.

  • Since so few have been stumbled upon, the group lacks a proper species classification.

• The most intact example is a partial jawbone with few teeth discovered on China's Tibetan Plateau.

Is there enough info to classify Homo juluensis as a new species? It’s debatable, but researchers claim that the large head and wide teeth of the H. juluensis are distinct enough to support a new species classification, even though the teeth resemble the Denisovans enough to fall under their species.

Want a visual? Interact with a diagram of the human family tree here.

Space

This space mission will create artificial solar eclipses

The next breakthrough in space aeronautics better involve a laser. Yesterday morning, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the cutting-edge Proba-3 satellites, which will create artificial solar eclipses to help study the sun’s atmosphere.

The mission (see overview) was briefly delayed due to a technical issue involving the rocket’s propulsion system but was eventually cleared for liftoff around 4 am local time in Sriharikota, India.

Space science

Two satellites will be used in the mission to investigate the sun's corona, the outer atmosphere of the sun that can reach temperatures of about two million degrees, and has a major impact on Earth through mass ejections and solar flares.

By keeping the satellites 150 meters apart, Proba-3 seeks to demonstrate precision formation flying and produce man-made solar eclipses. The method can produce about 50 artificial eclipses every year and enables long-term observations of the sun's corona, up to six hours per orbit.

• Researchers can currently only study the sun’s corona during total eclipses on Earth, which occur 60 times every 100 years and only last a few minutes.

The launch comes after the ISRO's other groundbreaking missions, including Chandrayaan-3, the first mission to achieve a soft landing on the south polar region of the moon (which found magma under the surface), and Aditya-L1, India's first space-based solar observatory.

Looking forward: The Proba-3 mission could unearth (no pun intended) some space mysteries the ISRO and EPA are hoping to solve… click here to see the five questions that have puzzled researchers.

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Grab Bag

TikTok Shop may soon rival Amazon after e-commerce boom

I thought it was great until my credit card got hacked (not kidding). This year's Black Friday saw TikTok Shop report over $100 million in sales as a plethora of product sellers migrated to the platform to sell their goods to TikTok's 170 million users.

Despite a possible ban looming over the highly popular app, TikTok shop is expected to almost double its sales to $50 billion… and it debuted only a little over a year ago.

Brainrot buying

TikTok tripled its US shopping sales on Black Friday, a surge that was largely thanks to over 30,000 content creators and merchants livestreaming on the platform—essentially becoming an off-brand QVC—with some raking in millions of dollars in revenue.

• Live shopping is a practice that’s extremely popular in China, where ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) is located.

  • Livestreams on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, generated over $200 billion in revenue last year.

The format hasn't taken off yet, and attempts by Amazon and Meta to enter the live shopping market have both failed, but the platform is still hoping to duplicate that success in the United States.

Amazon can be beaten? TikTok Shop is putting up crazy numbers with its $50 billion in sales, but it’s still essentially pocket change when looking at Amazon’s potential $757 billion in sales this year. But TikTok isn’t trying to copy them, it wants to be a cheap, easy substitute more akin to Shien or Temu.

Life was found in inhospitable regions of Antarctica

Maybe we should stop making man-made solar eclipses and study this instead. New evidence suggests that life has been hiding between two massive glaciers, seemingly finding a way to live in the most isolated continent in the world. Lake Enigma, a remote lake in Antarctica that was once thought to be completely frozen and uninhabitable by life, has been found to support microbiotic life.

Frozen findings

Researchers from the National Research Council of Italy’s Institute of Polar Sciences made the discovery during the "XXXV Italian Expedition to Antarctica", where ground-penetrating radar scans showed that liquid water was sitting beneath ice caps.

• The team then used a custom-made drilling system that allowed them to extract water samples without contaminating them.

• After lab analysis, the samples showed evidence of 21 bacterial and eukaryotic phyla in several areas of Lake Enigma.

According to the team’s paper, posted in Communications Earth & Environment (see here), researchers think an earlier Lake Enigma may have once supported a rich ecology, but at some point in the past, a permanently frozen top layer formed, leaving behind a "simple aquatic food web".

Why does this matter? The discovery sheds light upon microorganism’s ability to adapt and survive in even the most extreme, inhospitable environments. During the winter, Lake Enigma can reach temperatures as low as -41 degrees Fahrenheit.

Unexplored continent: One of the numerous initiatives underway to explore Antarctica is a new research vessel that the US National Science Foundation hopes will be able to penetrate the ice to reach difficult-to-research locations. Its expected launch will be in 2031.

Fast Facts

Costly Coffee: Coffee futures reached their highest level since 1977 last week. While the price of cheaper robusta beans increased 7.7% to almost double the price from the beginning of the year, the most popular bean variety, arabica, has increased by around 70% this year to $3.18 per pound on Wednesday.

Bargain Buying: Taking advantage of steep discounts, Americans spent a record $13.3 billion on Cyber Monday, roughly 7.3% more than in 2023, according to an Adobe report.

Saint Spending: Bible sales are up 22% this year compared to the same time in 2023, according to Circa BookScan. Comparatively, total book sales in the same period are only up 1%.

Flying Finances: A Senate investigative panel found that US airlines American, Delta, United, Spirit, and Frontier made $12.4 billion combined from charging customers extra for choosing seats on planes from 2018 to 2023.

Indie Initiative: We’re trending back to cable… again. Smaller, more niche streaming services (like Crunchyroll, Hallmark+, and Shudder) have grown 20% in the past year, outpacing bigger services like Netflix and Disney+, which have only grown 7%.