By Walt Hickey

Romulus

Alien: Romulus made $108.2 million worldwide in its opening weekend, thanks to a boost from Imax screens and other large formats, marking it the latest in a pretty decent summer at the domestic box office. The movie was made on a slightly-more-reined-in budget for an Alien movie at $80 million, carving out an easier path to profitability compared to earlier films. The franchise’s plot centers on a charming little species just minding its own business.

J. Kim Murphy, Variety

Elvis Has Left The Building (To His Rightful Heirs)

A Missouri woman was arrested after the feds allege she tried to defraud the family of Elvis Presley out of Graceland, nearly orchestrating a fraudulent sale of the iconic property by claiming it had been put up as collateral for a $3.8 million loan that Lisa Marie Presley didn’t repay before her death. The scheme is said to have involved faked loan documents with forged signatures and a fraudulent foreclosure notice published in a Memphis daily newspaper announcing an auction that was swiftly blocked by actress Riley Keough, Elvis’ granddaughter.

Chris Eggertsen, Billboard

Roscosmos

Russia’s space industry has been operating at a loss lately, and is on pace to launch the fewest number of rockets since 1961, when Yuri Gagarin went to space. Thursday’s launch out of Baikonur was only Russia’s ninth orbital launch of the year, in no small part because Western customers have taken their business elsewhere following the invasion of Ukraine. Cancellations of those contracts have cost Roscosmos 180 billion rubles ($2.1 billion), according to the Russian space agency’s first deputy director, and it’s looking like it may not break even until 2025.

Eric Berger, Ars Technica

EVs

Municipal adoption of electric vehicles is picking up faster than anticipated among police departments, which have begun to take note that the acceleration on these cars is way, way zippier than in an internal combustion engine. Tired of getting outraced by EVs, police departments have snapped up Tesla Model Ys in particular given the model’s range and power. The Michigan State Police’s precision driving unit publishes vehicle data for police departments nationwide, and clocked the Chevy Blazer EV and the Ford Mustang Mach-E going from 0 to 100 mph in 11 seconds, half the time of gas-powered options. The NYPD has about 200 EVs, and the chief fleet officer reported a 60 percent to 70 percent maintenance savings compared to the gas-powered squad cars.

Matteo Wong, The Atlantic

Chicxulub

A new study has concluded that the impactor that wiped out the dinosaurs was an asteroid from beyond Jupiter, ruling out the possibility that it was a comet or a more local asteroid. The painstaking study looked at the presence of ruthenium isotope levels in samples from around the world, and found that only the Chicxulub crater had a mix of ruthenium isotopes from the outer solar system, which are typical of a carbon-rich asteroid rather than the closer-to-the-sun, stony kind of asteroid. A previous study of Chicxulub-class objects found they should hit Earth about once every 250 million to 500 million years, so we’re probably fine-ish.

Lee Billings, Scientific American

Anime

Right now, Japan exports 4.7 trillion yen in content, a number that’s rapidly increased as anime and manga have skyrocketed in popularity the world over. By comparison, Japan’s incredibly successful semiconductor industry exports 5.7 trillion yen in chips, and it’s steel business exports 5.1 trillion yen in steel, so fun pictures with plot is up there with some pretty heavy-hitting industrial titans. The government wants to keep fostering that global appeal, and in some of the more successful scenarios they’re modeling out, the Japanese content industry could eclipse the chips and steel businesses and be a peer to its vaunted auto industry, which has 13 trillion yen in exports. That probably depends on how long this final arc of One Piece actually ends up running and whether or not Hayao Miyazaki can finally be physically restrained from making yet another animation masterpiece.

Yohei Matsuo, Nikkei Asia

Juice

The European Space Agency’s Juice spacecraft is about to execute a clever maneuver, bypassing and then whipping around the Earth to reach Venus. Its final destination is, in fact, Jupiter, but by using the gravity of Earth and its neighbors, the European Space Agency will be able to brake and then slingshot Juice to Jupiter on its 4.1 billion-mile, eight-year trip to a planet that is on average 800 million kilometers away. The lunar-Earth flyby will take place late Monday into early Tuesday. The mission would have needed an impossible 60,000 kilograms of onboard propellant to make it to Jupiter directly without the gravitational funny business.

Nina Massey, Press Agency

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