By Walt Hickey

Inside Out

Pixar’s Inside Out shattered expectations and made $155 million domestically, crushing the $90 million projections and becoming the second-biggest three-day launch for an animated film behind only Incredibles 2. It also did phenomenally well abroad, racking up a global cume of $295 million. Pixar has had a hard time over the past several years, and experiments with releasing their movies direct-to-streaming caused a string of miserable business for the studio.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Cricket

Cricket is the second-most popular sport in the world, but in the United States it’s mostly been supplanted by its successor, baseball. However, the surprise performance of the U.S. team at the Men’s T20 World Cup has drawn more eyeballs to a sport that has increasingly been attempting to make inroads stateside. Major League Cricket is attempting to build more 7,000- to 10,000-seat stadiums for the sport, with cities like San Francisco — which has a community of 250,000 people originally from South Asia, where the sport is sensationally popular — seen as an ideal site to build a proper stadium for teams like MLC’s San Francisco Unicorns.

Patrick Sisson, The New York Times

Voyager

NASA has successfully fixed Voyager 1, which is 15 billion miles from Earth and was sending back nonsensical data after a memory problem. According to the space agency, Voyager 1 is sending back scientific data from all four of its instruments, including data about plasma waves, magnetic fields and space-bound particles. The effort to repair Voyager 1 was fraught with difficulties inherent in repairing a device from the 1970s that is also several billion miles away; when they send the spacecraft commands, it takes 45 hours to hear anything back from it.

Wes Davis, The Verge

You See, We Lost the Entwives

Encephalartos woodii is a plant from South Africa, a cycad, and one of the most threatened species on the planet. Discovered in 1895, the only known specimen was found in the Ngoye Forest, and no others have been found. While stems were collected and offshoots cultivated in gardens, the original was removed from the wild in 1916 and is in a protective enclosure in Pretoria. The issue is that it and all the clones of it are male and lacking a female, making natural reproduction impossible. A search to find a female E. woodii involved a drone search of 195 acres of the 10,000-acre Ngoye Forest, with an algorithmic search turning up nothing.

Laura Cinti, The Conversation

Swimming

This weekend saw the U.S. Olympic team trials take place in a temporary pool constructed in Lucas Oil Stadium — an engineering marvel in its own right — in Indianapolis, the home of the Colts. Competitive swimming has had capacity problems in previous venues and is an increasingly popular sport, so an audacious plan by U.S. Swimming to put a pool in a football stadium was carried out. Engineers from Dodd, Myrtha and Spear Corporation built two pools on top of the turf, raising the floor of the venue by 9 feet and building 50,000 square feet of decking. To simply fill two pools, the company pumped 1,200 gallons of water per minute for 13 hours from fire hydrants.

Laine Higgins, The Wall Street Journal

Octopus

Japan is in a rough spot, suffering both from inflation as well as a depreciating yen. Octopus, long a beloved food in Japan, has become increasingly popular in Europe and China, which has Japanese buyers getting outbid and is driving costs up. At the Tokyo Toyosu fish market in 2023, octopus sold for 1,668 yen per kilogram wholesale, double the level of a decade ago, and higher even than the 1,550 yen to 1,600 yen per kilogram for A2 wagyu beef. Soon, South Korea will overtake Japan as the main export destination of U.S. beef; the yen depreciated by 12 percent against the dollar in the 12 months ending May 2024, while the Korean won weakened just 5 percent.

Hisashi Tsutsui, Nikkei Asia

eVTOL

The latest designs for air taxis from Joby and Archer are 20 to 25 decibels below your typical helicopter, and eVTOLS might very well be four or five times less noisy than their existing competitors. The space has become increasingly attractive, as over two dozen electric vertical takeoff companies have been founded in the past decade. The battery-powered eVTOL taxis are all aiming for journeys of 18 to 25 miles, carrying commuters or cargo at high speeds.

Steven Ashley, Scientific American

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