By Walt Hickey

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Apes

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the 10th installment in a 56-year-old film franchise, made $129 million in its opening weekend, of which $72.5 million was made internationally. The rebooted franchise — it’s the fourth film in the new apes era — has done particularly well overseas, making the bulk of their money outside North America. Premium, larger formats have continued to drive box office, with those screens making up 41 percent of revenues and Imax alone accounting for $13.2 million of the gross. If there’s a lesson, it’s that this obviously means that audiences just want politics out of their movies, as the Planet of the Apes franchise is just about a bunch of monkeys with absolutely no subtext whatsoever, that’s right, nothing going on there.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Not Exactly Rocket Science

Scientists have just published the highest resolution image ever of a small piece of the human brain just 1 cubic millimeter in size. The dataset this single square millimeter of mind produced is 1,400 terabytes in size, and if the full human brain were to be reconstructed in a similar fashion, the resulting dataset would be a zettabyte, a billion terabytes, or about a year’s worth of all digital content produced. The rendered image shows a vast and interconnected web of neurons, colored by size and ranging from 15 to 30 micrometers across. A human brain has 86 billion of those neurons, with some 100 trillion connections. It’s kind of crazy that most of them are used to replay embarrassing events from your life right as you’re trying to fall asleep, but them’s the breaks.

Cassandra Willyard, MIT Technology Review

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Tractors

According to a 2023 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, over 50 percent of corn, cotton, rice, sorghum, soybeans and winter wheat is planted using farm equipment with automated guidance, tech that essentially steers itself with only oversight from a farmer in the cab. However, weather has thrown a wrench into that technology over the past week, specifically space weather, which thanks to a solar storm has severely compromised a number of navigation systems used by farm equipment, interrupting the very peak of planting season. One chain of John Deere dealerships warned customers that some of their tractor systems may be malfunctioning as a result of the solar storm.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media

Sweetgreen

Sweetgreen, the largest purveyor of sad desk salads in the country, posted revenues of $157.9 million, up 26 percent year over year, mostly thanks to hiked prices. One of the more interesting numbers was the per-store margins of 18.1 percent, which is remarkably good for food service. There are two particular units of interest, the two “Infinite Kitchens,” which are the test locations for an automated bowl creation system that uses robots to mix up the items. In that pair of locations, the profit margin was 28 percent, 10 points higher than the typical store.

Danny Klein, QSR Magazine

Wings

Amid rising beef prices, Americans are eating more chicken, with sales up 3 percent in the year ending April 21 compared to the previous 52 weeks. Lots of that spending is happening in other parts of the bird beyond the breast, with Wingstop reporting a 21.6 percent increase last quarter in same-store sales. Tyson is adding 16 new products in 2024, and seven of those are chicken, with it selling 20 billion chicken nuggets and 5.5 billion chicken wings a year.

Patrick Thomas, The Wall Street Journal

GLP-1s

Goldman Sachs projects that 15 million people, or 13 percent of the U.S. population, could be taking GLP-1s like Ozempic and Wegovy by 2030, a substantial enough chunk of the population that food manufacturers are getting keen to the fact that they’ll probably have to get used to lots of people changing what and how much they want to eat. Early studies are small, but find that those on GLP-1s drink more water and less soda and alcohol, with the vast majority saying they eat less, and lots more eating fewer snacks.

Jennifer Lawinski, Food Dive

Drop the Hammer

Today kicks off the spring auction season, and this week over 1,700 works of modern and contemporary art will be sold at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips. Those works are expected to generate somewhere between $1.2 billion to $1.8 billion in sales. That is quite bad: In 2022, the same season generated $2.8 billion in sales, so this is a serious retreat from the especially heady days of the immediate ripple of pandemic-era art buying.

Zachary Small and Julia Halperin, The New York Times

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