Lottery-like investing behavior is the youths’ preferred flavor: Speculative financial products — like crypto, NFTs and meme stocks — are growing more popular among younger generation of investors, as the promise of big payouts becomes more lucrative than the (now fading) idea of financial stability, the Financial Times reports. The current global financial backdrop — marked by soaring housing prices, stagnant wages and rising inflation — have discouraged DIY traders in the under-40 age bracket from taking traditional investment routes that offer little return on investment, pushing more and more people towards riskier, more anti-establishment investments that seem to operate on their own sets of rules. “The idea that the mainstream economy is trustworthy, more so than these other [assets], is kind of dubious in recent experience,” a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU tells the salmon-colored paper.

Young investors don’t mind the risk — even though crypto just went through a crash: Rising debt levels and lower levels of returns have fundamentally changed people’s relationships with risk, experts say. Young investors are now more likely to treat speculative assets as lottery tickets, the FT says, approaching them with the notion that while they could be worthless, the gamble could pay off. “A lot of people view it like they can’t afford not to,” one young investor says. “I think they’re running out of hope.”

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Mind-reading chips have officially arrived: Brain-computer interface startup Synchron implanted its first device into the brain of an ALS patient in New York earlier this month, Bloomberg reported. This is the first US clinical trial of a brain implant that can help severely paralyzed patients communicate by using their thoughts to send texts and emails. The 1.5-inch device has already been implanted in four people in Australia, who have since been able to send WhatsApp messages and shop online — with no reported side effects so far. Synchron has now overtaken Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which is yet to receive FDA approval (Synchron got the regulatory greenlight to begin human trials in July 2021). Neuralink is a neural interface technology that Musk plans to embed in brains to enhance human intelligence in an increasingly AI-driven world.