Good morning. It’s Tuesday, April 15 — and the weather’s throwing tantrums again. One minute it’s sunshine and serotonin, the next it’s a full-blown existential crisis in cloud form.

Today is the birthday of the ultimate overachiever-slash-weirdo: Leonardo da Vinci. You know, the guy who painted the Mona Lisa and sketched helicopters before anyone even invented bicycles. He never went to school, loved a good corpse dissection, and left behind 6,000 pages of journal entries — many of which were written backwards. Yes, backwards. As in, mirror-only decoding.

Anyway, appreciate you letting us invade your inbox. Read on, you glorious human.

Today’s stories:

• Hudson Yards gets park, school, casino — priorities

• Olympus Mons: Mars’ monstrous mountain flex

• Apple panic-shipped iPhones like contraband

• Prada buys Versace — style clash incoming

• Canva makes billions, still ghosts coders

• Turns out skin literally cries when hurt

• Katy Perry yeets into space and back

• Stunt teams finally get Oscar justice

• Texans now get ice cream by drone

• Intel cuts chips, clings to hope

  and more…

Markets were all over the place Monday — but tech stocks pulled them back into the green after Trump unexpectedly exempted smartphones, computers, and key parts like chips from his latest round of “reciprocal” tariffs.

The Dow jumped 312 points, closing above 40,500. The Nasdaq and S&P 500 also ended higher after dipping earlier in the day. Turns out, not taxing half the internet helps.

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Apple Panic-Flew 600 Tons of iPhones to Dodge Tariffs

Apple just airlifted 1.5 million iPhones — that’s 600 tons of sleek anxiety — from India to the U.S. in a frantic bid to dodge Trump-era tariffs. With new fees threatening phones made in China, India, and Vietnam, Apple booked six cargo planes and begged Indian customs to speed things up. They even got Chennai airport to cut clearance time from 30 hours to 6. That’s not shipping — that’s smuggling with paperwork. Apple’s also cranking up iPhone production in India, working Sundays and everything. In 2024, 14% of all iPhones came out of India. Apple’s not just avoiding tariffs — they’re training for a full-on supply chain decathlon.

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Prada buys Versace, tariffs be damned. Prada just dropped $1.4 billion to scoop up Versace, pulling off a high-stakes Italian fashion merger in the middle of global tariff chaos. Bold move, but Prada’s been thriving while most luxury brands are slowing down — unlike Versace, which has been losing money lately despite all the gold chains and baroque drama. This merger isn’t about blending styles. Prada’s minimalism and Versace’s maximalism couldn’t be further apart — which is exactly the point. New customers, no creative overlap, and one giant flex for Italian fashion in a market dominated by French giants like LVMH.

Canva hits $3B, becomes queen of the unicorns. Canva, the Aussie design platform that made Photoshop sweat, is now the most valuable female-founded startup in the world — pulling in $3 billion in revenue last year. Melanie Perkins, who co-founded the company without a tech background (and still got ghosted by 100+ VCs), is now casually reinventing coding. The latest drop: Canva Code, a generative AI tool that writes app code based on simple prompts like “make an interactive map.” No CS degree needed. With 230 million users and 95% of the Fortune 500 on board, Canva isn’t just playing with Adobe and Microsoft anymore. It’s building its own sandbox — and everyone’s getting dragged in.

Intel offloads half of Altera to Silver Lake. Intel just sold a 51% stake in its Altera chip unit to private equity giant Silver Lake, valuing the business at $8.75 billion. Altera will now operate independently, with Intel keeping 49% and pretending it's not still calling the shots. The move is part of Intel’s latest cost-cutting, balance-sheet-fixing, please-don’t-panic strategy. Altera makes FPGAs — programmable chips used in everything from AI to telecoms — and brought in $1.54 billion last year. Intel bought it back in 2015 for $16.7 billion, so… not exactly a financial win. Leadership’s also changing hands, with Raghib Hussain set to take over as CEO in May. IPO plans are still on the table, but first, they’ve got to finish the paperwork — the deal closes in late 2025.

Katy Perry Went to Space (For Like, Ten Minutes)

Blue Origin launched an all-female crew into space Monday, featuring Katy Perry and Gayle King. It was the first all-women mission since 1963 — except this one lasted just over 10 minutes. They hit the edge of space, floated, and dropped back down before brunch ended. The rocket, New Shepard, took off from Bezos’ West Texas site. It marked Blue Origin’s 11th human flight. Tickets remain outrageously expensive — $150,000 just to get on the waitlist — unless you’re famous, in which case it’s free.

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Drones now deliver ice cream and vaccines in Texas. Zipline, the startup that drops everything from meds to popsicles out of the sky, just launched in Dallas. Partnering with Walmart, they’re now delivering orders in under 30 minutes using their latest drone, the P2 Zip — basically a flying robot with dinner plate precision. The service kicked off in Mesquite, 15 miles east of Dallas, with plans to expand across the metro area. The drones can carry up to 8 pounds, land on doorsteps, and stay chill even in rain and 45 mph winds.

Your skin screams when it’s hurt. New research shows that when skin cells get injured, they send out tiny electric pulses — kind of like a slow-motion scream. Scientists used lasers to damage skin cells and found that they shoot out signals that travel about 40 cells away to warn the neighbors and help kickstart healing. These signals work like nerve messages but take way longer — about one to two seconds instead of just milliseconds. They’re powered by calcium and pack a surprising electric punch.

The largest volcano in the solar system. Olympus Mons on Mars is the solar system’s reigning giant — tallest volcano, largest mountain, full-on planetary flex. It towers 13.6 miles high, nearly triple Mount Everest, and spreads 370 miles across, basically the size of France if France were on fire. It’s a shield volcano with chill, low slopes and a massive caldera, built by slow, steady eruptions over millions of years. No tectonic drama on Mars means Olympus just sat there, erupting forever, becoming the red planet’s ultimate power move.

Stunt People Finally Get Their Oscar

It only took 100 years, but the Academy is finally giving stunt design its own Oscar. Starting in 2028 — aka the 100th Academy Awards — films will officially be able to win for stuff like car flips, fight scenes, and falling off skyscrapers without dying. Stunt crews have been breaking bones for decades while getting zero recognition. Now they get a shiny gold man. About time.

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Hudson Yards West gets greenlight — and a casino. NYC just gave the thumbs-up to Hudson Yards West, a $13 billion mega-project that’s part luxury, part public good, and part blackjack table. Led by Related, Oxford, and Wynn Resorts, the plan will drop a resort casino, 1,500 apartments (only 324 affordable), a 5.6-acre park, and a shiny new public school onto the West Side Rail Yard. Wynn’s casino is expected to bring 5,000 permanent union jobs, 35,000 construction gigs, and a sweet $197 million in community reinvestment, courtesy of a 1% gaming revenue carve-out. Urban renewal, but with slot machines.

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TikTok of the day: watch here