Good morning. There may be a scientific reason why cat owners tend to be pretty chill. Researchers in Japan found that cat owners who spend more time physically close to their pets tend to be in a better mood, thanks to a “direct chemical link” between the felines and their glorified can openers.

In today’s briefing, we’ll cover riots in France, why homes just got cheaper, Japan’s launch to Mars, and much more.

— Chase Goepfert, Founder of NextGen News

France is dealing with one of its most violent stretches of unrest in years after demonstrations have swelled across the country.

The demonstrations began in September, when high school students took to the streets over teacher shortages, inadequate funding, and crumbling school facilities.

However, the scope and scale of them have grown rapidly:

While many protests have stayed peaceful, some have been marked by violence from fringe groups.

Paris saw some of the worst scenes, but the destruction caused by the riots has stretched nationwide:

Fresh clashes broke out over the past few days as police tried to prevent more looting, with one protester dying from cardiac arrest and more than 1,000 officers reporting injuries.

Who is responsible? The government blamed much of the violence on far-left groups and criminals using the demonstrations as cover, with President Emmanuel Macron saying the “unrestricted violence” must be separated from the legitimate issues being protested.

The housing market isn’t just tough for buyers. Homebuilders are increasingly struggling to sell houses as demand has dropped to its lowest level in over a decade.

That’s leading many to offer increasingly steep markdowns.

According to a new survey from the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), buyers just aren’t interested in, well, buying:

Why? High mortgage rates and expensive homes are keeping many would-be buyers on the sidelines, forcing builders to lower prices and offer additional perks to drum up business.

Even with those efforts… homebuilder confidence has plunged recently, falling to its lowest level since June 2012.

With many buyers sitting out, homebuilders are pulling out all the stops to win them back:

The market is flipping upside down: With builders eager to sell off their inventory, newly built homes are now cheaper than existing homes, a reversal of the usual housing market trend. In August, the median price of a newly built single-family home was $393,700, compared to $433,600 for an existing home. Happy hunting.

Most people couldn't tell you what scandium is for, but everyone knows what happens when roads go unsalted. North America keeps running short, and Atlas Salt (TSXV: SALT) is building a shovel-ready mine in Newfoundland, three days by ship from Boston, with C$188 million in projected yearly free cash flow.

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👃 Weight loss drugs are changing what perfume smells like. Perfume companies are testing whether GLP-1’s like Ozempic and Wegovy are making people crave food-inspired fragrances, with scents ranging from cherry and vanilla to hot sauce, miso, and even truffles. The companies are betting that as people eat less, they may want to satisfy their senses through smell instead. That might be a good gamble, since one study found that Americans taking GLP-1 drugs spend 26% more on fragrances than the average consumer, and food-inspired scents now account for 24% of new fragrances, up from just 9% two years ago.

🚢 Oil shipping prices have risen ninefold. While you probably know oil has hit record prices lately, so has the cost of shipping it. It will cost nearly $81 million to get one oil tanker from the US to Japan, compared to just $9.1 million last year. That's roughly nine times more, thanks to the Iran and Ukraine wars, attacks on shipping routes, and a shortage of available tankers. The added expense works out to $40.50 per barrel of oil, with experts estimating that every $10 increase in shipping costs can add about 23 cents to a gallon of gasoline. And because fuel powers everything from delivery trucks to farm equipment, the price hikes aren't stopping at the pump.

👾 Scientists discover a plastic-eating “Pac-Man” enzyme. Researchers in Germany recently discovered an enzyme that helps bacteria chew through certain biodegradable plastics, breaking them down into their basic building blocks. In experiments, several types of bioplastics completely decomposed within 250 to 330 days, while conventional plastic barely broke down at all. Even stranger, the enzyme can also break down penicillin, raising questions about a possible connection to antibiotic resistance.

Every morning, financial news follows the same script. Headlines panic, coverage catastrophises, and somewhere inside the noise is the story that actually matters — the one that tells you where the opportunity sits, not just where the fear is pointing.

Most sources have stopped looking. The alarm is easier to sell.

The Daily Upside was created by Wall Street insiders for readers who crave real insight over recycled anxiety. Five minutes of global business and finance, before the noise sets the agenda — just the facts, context, and analysis your decisions need.

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Turns out, pulling off a massive cyberattack in the modern day doesn't require a team of expert hackers (or a war chest of money). Last week, a Chinese hacker broke into more than 100 websites using only AI agents and a few thousand dollars.

Well, they technically didn’t do anything. The hacker reportedly used an open-source platform called Cairn, which allows AI agents to tackle complicated problems with minimal human supervision.

According to cybersecurity experts:

Less than 100 Chinese characters were used to give the AI agents instructions that eventually led them to target over 1,200 websites belonging to major companies.

It was a cheap operation: Officials believe the entire cost of the cyberattack was only around $5,000, averaging roughly $50 per successful attack.

It’s part of a larger trend: Cybercriminals have increasingly been using AI to carry out attacks that once required far more time, money, and technical know-how. Researchers have recently uncovered other cyberattacks involving AI that have stolen sensitive contacts, bank and credit card information, and broken into cryptocurrency exchanges.

Japan is taking its space exploration ambitions to a whole new level, sending a spacecraft millions of miles away to collect dirt from one of Mars' moons.

The mission, appropriately called the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX), will study Phobos, a small, oddly shaped moon that scientists still don't fully understand.

According to Japan’s space agency:

If everything goes according to plan, Japan will become the first country to land a spacecraft on Phobos and bring samples of its surface back to Earth. Researchers say the trip should take roughly five years.

But why go after dirt? To solve a billion-year-old mystery. Scientists want to know how Phobos formed and see how Mars went from a wet, atmospheric planet to a frozen desert. The samples could even contain pieces of Mars blasted into space by ancient asteroid impacts, giving researchers a chance to study the Red Planet without ever landing on it.

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→ Archaeologists in Iraq uncovered the remains of a Neanderthal who may have been killed by a wooden spear 75,000 years ago, which would make it humanity's oldest example of deadly violence.

→ Astronomers discovered the first-ever green star, a dead white dwarf 280 light-years away that developed its unusual color after absorbing rocky debris from its former planets.

→ AI giants like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are warning employees about corporate spies using bribes, surveillance, and even romantic advances to steal valuable AI secrets.

→ MIT researchers have developed an AI tool that doubles the accuracy of weather forecasts two to six weeks in advance, giving communities more time to prepare for extreme weather.

→ Researchers found that patients who wore noise-canceling headphones during surgery were 32% less likely to experience nausea and vomiting afterward, suggesting operating-room noise may affect the body even under anesthesia.

→ Why dogs are taking over runways in Paris.

→ Look at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award winners.

→ What experts say can be a sure sign someone is lying.

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