NASA's Perseverance Rover is about to complete a Martian marathon, having traveled just shy of 26.22 miles.

• It should cross the proverbial finish line sometime this month, mission manager Robert Hogg tells Reuters.

🪂 The car-sized rover landed on Mars in February 2021, with a primary mission meant to last nearly two Earth years.

• It's still kicking over five years later — continuing a long tradition of NASA robots and probes well outperforming their initial objectives. (Voyager 1, now in interstellar space, has been transmitting valuable data back to Earth for nearly half a century.)

🔋 Perseverance deputy project scientist Ken Farley tells Reuters: "The rover continues in good health with at least a decade left in its power source ... The duration of the mission will depend on choices NASA makes."

🦠 The rover's most important discovery so far: a sample from Mars' Jezero Crater that bore signs of ancient microbial life.

• NASA and the European Space Agency had been planning an ambitious effort to collect samples from Perseverance and return them to Earth.
• That mission's future is unclear amid questions over funding.

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Wholesale cocoa prices have plunged 70% from their late 2024 peak — but don't expect cheaper chocolate anytime soon, Axios' Matt Phillips reports.

• Hershey recently told analysts that, despite the drop in cocoa, the company sees "no change in the pricing environment."

🤑 Companies typically don't cut prices unless competition or economic conditions force their hands.

• They also like to make up for lost ground when their input prices fall.

🌴 Allison Kleinfelter, head of communications at Hershey, tells Axios: "We absorbed unprecedented cocoa costs for two years before taking pricing in 2025 that didn't fully cover those costs."

• "Cocoa markets remain volatile and elevated, and our plan is to recover those costs over the next few years while keeping our brands affordable and accessible."

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1. ✈️ Pakistan's top military commander is traveling to Tehran today in an effort to reach a deal under which the U.S. and Iran would agree to end the war and start negotiations toward a broader agreement. More from Barak Ravid.
2. 📉 A key measure of U.S. consumer sentiment hit a new all-time low this month. The University of Michigan index fell to 44.2 amid worries about gas prices, inflation and more. Go deeper.
3. ⛑️ Congo's Ebola outbreak now poses a "very high" risk there, the World Health Organization said today. The risk of global spread remains low. Get the latest.

A biotech company aiming to resurrect lost creatures says it has hatched 26 live chicks from a 3D-printed structure mimicking an eggshell.

🦅 Colossal Biosciences CEO Ben Lamm says the tech could one day be used to genetically tweak living birds to resemble extinct species, like New Zealand's South Island giant moa.

• Outside scientists say the technology lacks some components to be truly considered an artificial egg — and that the idea of reviving extinct beasts is likely impossible.

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