By Walt Hickey

Nintendo

While their rivals at Sony and Microsoft have spent a generation chasing down the most vibrant screens and most dynamic-appearing games, utilizing the bleeding edge of graphics card technology to represent their products in stunning, realistic verisimilitude, Nintendo? Nintendo doesn’t really care, and has managed to make over $10 billion in revenue every year of the past several years despite bucking every major graphics trend in their industry. Profit last year stood at $3.3 billion, well over the $2 billion at Sony, despite just $11.4 billion in revenue compared to Sony’s $29.1 billion. One reason? In lieu of devoting resources to the crispest-looking pixels, Nintendo doubles down on gameplay and the action within the games.

Manny Fidel, Sherwood News

Stonehenge

A new analysis found that one of the gargantuan rocks at Stonehenge — the “Altar Stone,” a 16-foot, 6-ton slab of sandstone in the inner circle of the monument — was hauled from 500 miles away. The study, published in Nature, found that rather than the original belief that the stone came from nearby Wales, instead the rock was hauled down from northeastern Scotland, vastly further away than Wales. The manner of transportation for how the stone got there remains a mystery, whether it was sailed down by builders, hauled by pilgrims, or just yeeted southward by an enterprising Scotsman out of sheer spite toward the English.

Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

Humpback

Old Timer is a humpback whale spotted as recently as July, whose tail was first spotted in 1972. This means the creature is at least 53 years old, making him one of the oldest humpbacks in the world. Populations have rebounded in recent decades, but tough conditions over the past 10 years have killed many of the humpbacks, so the revelation of his survival is a relief. The whales are identified by the unique appearances of their tails, which evolve over the years but nevertheless present identifiable signatures, with the Happywhale database containing 1.1 million images of over 100,000 individual humpbacks. For Old Timer, one must imagine life is rather sweet growing old; in his youth in the mid-’70s, there were just 1,200 to 1,600 individuals in the North Pacific, while today humpbacks number in the tens of thousands.

Emily Anthes, The New York Times

Shelf

From 2009 to 2023, the square footage of shelving in supercenters decreased 5 percent and in supermarkets decreased 3.3 percent. This has made an already bare-knuckle fight over shelf space even tougher, as an ever increasing number of brands and options vie for shelf real estate that has become ever rarer. Retailers have long charged slotting fees, which are prices paid by brands to get products in aisles. Some are popular enough to evade the fees, but on average you’re talking anywhere from $100 per item per store to five or six figures just to get on shelves.

Jennifer Williams, The Wall Street Journal

Scams

The ascent of AI and its ability to make plausibly believable video and audio clones of popular figures with lots of available voice and video footage has led to a rash of scams that attempt to deepfake businessmen who are highly regarded by the type of people who might be bamboozled. An analysis of over 2,000 such deepfakes found that Elon Musk was the most common “spokesperson” for the scams by far, and whose AI visage accounted for nearly a quarter of all the scams and 90 percent of cryptocurrency-themed scams. Other prominent AI puppets included Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos.

Stuart A. Thompson, The New York Times

Wash Cycle

The good people at GE Appliances found that the average American load of laundry sits wet, unattended in the washing machine for two hours, based on an analysis of 13 million wash cycles across 90,000 homes from 2020 to 2022. The answer, they hope, is two-in-one machines, a staple of Europe that has yet to catch on in the U.S. but if GE gets their way will soon be the standard manner in which Americans wash clothes. The newest incarnations — from Haier-owned GE and South Korea’s LG and Samsung — are about the same size of a single washer or dryer, and cost about $2,000, taking roughly two hours to finish a single load of laundry.

Jiyoung Sohn, The Wall Street Journal

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Unspeakably Complex Fish

The South American lungfish known as Lepidosiren paradoxa has the largest genome yet sequenced, with 91 billion chemical bases, according to a new study. Those bases still come together to just 20,000 genes, roughly the same as a human has. Lungfish are strange beasties, breathing air and having lobe fins, and are believed to closely resemble the most recent common ancestor of vertebrates. Researchers are keen to understand their genome, having first analyzed the lungfish of Africa and Australia and only now moving on to the behemoth genome of the South American version. The biggest known genome of any living thing — so far — belongs to the New Caledonian fork fern, which has 160 billion bases, and no it will not share why.

Elizabeth Pennisi, Science

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