Scientists have done something both fun and dystopian: They’ve created an AI death clock.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen and Northeastern University developed life2vec, an AI model trained on the health, education, employment, income, and other data of Danish citizens collected between 2016-2020, per USA Today.

How it works

The recently-published findings are a bit more scientific than the demonic app from the 2019 film Countdown, which has a 26% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

The model received the data, provided by the Danish government, in sentences, such as: “During her third year at secondary boarding school, Hermione followed five elective classes.” (That’s an actual example sentence, not a Harry Potter thing.)

• “The whole story of a human life, in a way, can also be thought of as a giant long sentence of the many things that can happen to a person,” study author Sune Lehmann said.

From there, life2vec predicted the life trajectories of 100k people — very Minority Report — ages 35-65. When asked to predict who would live for at least four years past Jan. 1, 2016, it was correct 79% of the time, per Financial Times.

Living participants of the study were not informed of the model’s predictions, something Lehmann noted would be “very irresponsible.”

What makes a longer or shorter life?

Barring unpredictable tragedies, those predicted to have shorter life spans were:

• Male
• Diagnosed with a mental illness
• Working in a skilled profession
• Lower income

Some of these things we already knew, but a potential use for this research is to identify other factors that impact health.

What researchers do not want is for corporations, such as insurance companies, to use the model on individuals.

But what we can’t wait for is for the model to predict the same time and date of death for every one of us, indicating it knows something we don’t.

It’s not every day that an 111-year-old product suddenly shoots to internet fame.

But for Stanley, that’s exactly what happened. After more than a century of selling reusable thermoses to pilots and workmen, the brand’s 40-ounce, $45 Quencher tumbler took off with a new group of fans: women on social media.

And when we say “took off,” we mean it:

• Since 2020, the insulated Stanley Quencher has become one of the world’s most popular water bottles.
• Stanley’s revenue skyrocketed from $73m in 2019 to $194m in 2021.
• In 2022, the company redesigned its Quencher in new colors and finishes, doubling revenue to $402m.
• Last year, the brand’s sales topped an estimated $750m.

It wasn’t just new colors driving the brand’s meteoric rise; social media played a large part in the tumbler’s comeback.

On TikTok, #stanleytumbler has amassed 1.1B views, with influencers flaunting their Quenchers in rare colors and massive collections.

To be fair, the concept of a trendy water bottle isn’t entirely new — there were Nalgenes covered in stickers, patterned S’wells, and the good ol’ Hydro Flask.

Forty ounces of trouble

Unlike its predecessors, though, the Stanley tumbler is causing a big commotion. Literally.

People camped outside Target to get their hands on the Stanley x Starbucks pink tumbler, and stampedes broke out over a limited-edition Galentine’s Day collection.

Where there’s that much demand, there are resellers capitalizing:

• On StockX, tumblers from the Starbucks collab are reselling for ~$290.
• Resellers have also flooded eBay, offering the Valentine’s Day Quenchers for hundreds of dollars.

Then, of course, there are the counterfeit cups being peddled by scammers.

There was a lead-poisoning scare when one TikTokersaid her 3-year-old’s water bottle tested positive for lead. (While the tumblers technically contain lead, it’s not exposed unless the bottle is severely damaged.)

Anyway, let us know when the Quencher reaches a size big enough to live in, since it’s apparently fire-proof.

• An iPhone from Alaska Airlines’ near-disastrous flight survived a 16k-foot drop. The device, one of several objects sucked out of the gaping hole left by a blown-out door plug on last week’s flight, was found near a highway in Portland, Oregon — perfectly intact and still in airplane mode. The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident, said it was the second phone recovered from the flight.
• Oh, to be a billionaire’s cow... Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly raising Angus and wagyu cattle on a diet of home-brewed beer and macadamia nuts at his $270m ranch in Hawaii. The beer is meant to stimulate their appetites, a practice that’s apparently not entirely uncommon. And while we love to imagine the Meta CEO cracking open a cold one with his beloved bovines, he ruined that fantasy by calling his latest passion project his “most delicious” one yet.
• Two stray dogs caused $350k in damages at a Houston car dealership. The dealership’s owner suspects the pair, who were caught scratching cars and ripping off bumpers, had been chasing cats. This isn’t the only recent dog-on-car crime: Last month, Italian police found that the culprit behind a spate of tire-slashings in a southern Italian village, which residents suspected was a sort of mafia-style intimidation, was just a stray dog with gum disease.
• The new Mercedes-Benz x Will.i.am collab nobody’s been waiting for. The MBUX Sound Drive, which debuted at CES 2024 this week, is an “interactive musical experience” that uses sensors and software to pair tracks with corresponding car functions, like acceleration, steering, and braking — kind of like a very expensive, driveable Bop-It. Not a Will.i.am fan? Fear not: Mercedes says it wants to open the platform so that any musician can make their own driving soundscape.