By Walt Hickey

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Spice Flows

Dune: Part Two made $81.5 million in North America, beating already high expectations of a $72 million to $75 million opening for the film. It also made $97 million overseas, for a global haul of $178.5 million, and that’s even before it releases in China and Japan. The movie pulled in $32.2 million of its global cume from Imax theaters, good for a solid 18 percent of revenue, and in 10 international markets it was the biggest opening ever. It’s unclear if the local censors will allow a screening on the massive, lucrative box office territory of Giedi Prime.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Roads

A schism has occurred, as a faction of Wikipedia editors who have cultivated 15,000 articles about roads and highways of the United States breaks off and moves their articles to a new online encyclopedia, AARoads, that is dedicated to their asphalt inventory exclusively. It’s the result of years of low tension about The Roads Project that escalated into an outright secession related to notability requirements and the kind of primary sources that are considered valuable. Most of the information about roads comes from the official organizations that maintain, pave and oversee their operation, but official sources lacking external corroboration are met with skepticism as a matter of policy, and there simply are not a lot of newspapers writing stories to the effect of “a road continues to exist connecting A and B.”

Thomas Germain, Gizmodo

Uranium

Uranium mines around the U.S. have been reactivating amid renewed demand. Most uranium production globally comes from Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia, but the U.S. has long been a producer. In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, uranium prices crashed as Japan and Germany began to phase out reactors. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that the world will need over 100,000 metric tons of uranium annually by 2040, which would require production to double. American uranium production peaked at 44 million pounds in 1980, but then the U.S. began to rely on imports, and by 2019 it hit a low of 174,000 pounds produced.

Jacob Lorinc and Maria Clara Cobo, Bloomberg

Wasabi

Demand for authentic wasabi out of Japan has increased, all while domestic production of the real stuff — not the horseradish concoction that’s popularly offered as a substitute on sushi plates — has declined. In 2022, Japan’s wasabi growers produced 1,635 tons, which is down 26 percent over the course of five years. Wasabi requires clean water, cool environments and can’t endure direct sunlight, so it’s a bit of a tricky crop. Even still, demand abroad is robust: There are 187,000 Japanese restaurants outside of Japan as of 2023, up 20 percent over 2021.

Junpei Kinefuchi, Nikkei Asia

Recruiters

Looking at the athletic department finances of 91 public universities that compete in the FBS tier of the NCAA, the schools have ratcheted up their spending in the wake of a decision to enable college athletes to hawk their names, images and likenesses. All told, total athletic department expenditures increased 13 percent from the 2021-22 season to the 2022-23 season, which followed the introduction of the NIL policy. Fueling that growth was recruiting, which saw spending increase 24 percent over the same period. It’s most acute in football, which saw spending for recruiting increase 32 percent over the course of the period.

Daniel Libit and Lev Akabas, Sportico

Cable

Viewership of many cable channels has dropped calamitously, and to stem the bleeding many are just turning their networks into ghosts of their former selves, producing no new shows but instead putting reliable classics like Ridiculousness on MTV, Seinfeld and The Office on Comedy Central, The Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon on TBS, as well as cheap reality shows with massive libraries everywhere else. MTV’s prime time viewership is down from an an average of 807,000 in 2014 to 256,000 in 2023. AMC’s prime time audience is down 73 percent over the period, USA is down 69 percent, the Disney Channel is down 93 percent, and most of the other flagship cable networks are down by more than half.

David Bauder, The Associated Press

Space

In the wake of the country’s invasion of Ukraine, the number of satellite launch orders fielded by Russia is down 90 percent, with the United States remaining the sole superpower in the space world amid new competition from India and China. In 2021, Russia launched 35 satellites from other countries, a figure that by 2022 was down to just two, and hit only three last year. The Roscosmos budget has been slashed from 32.3 billion rubles in 2018 to just 10.5 billion rubles in 2021. This is a contraction happening at the wrong time, as the global market for unmanned space launches is projected to grow from $12.2 billion in 2023 to $15.8 billion by 2032.

Aiko Munakata and Yukiko Une, Nikkei Asia

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