By Walt Hickey

Romulus

Alien: Romulus has become only the second Hollywood film to crack $50 million in China this year, earning 523 million yuan ($73.7 million) over two weeks. It’s a sign of Hollywood’s diminishing presence in the country, but also a sign of a weak year at the Chinese box office in general. So far, the China-backed Godzilla v Kong is doing the best of the American productions, earning $134 million. Overall, China’s box office is down 21 percent compared to the same point in 2023, coming in at $4.62 billion.

Patrick Frater, Variety

Dyes

From 1963 to 1987, the FDA authorized the use of nine synthetic dyes that it considers to be safe. Naturally, lots of people consider this to be a bad idea while lots of people consider it a solid one, for reasons scientific and personal, with researchers and advocates and dietitians and allergists and all manner of opinionated people thinking very sincere and strongly-held thoughts on whether or not the color is worth it. A bill poised to come to a vote this week in the California Senate would ban K-12 public schools in the state from offering any food that contains one of six synthetic dyes — Blue No. 1, Blue No. 2, Green No. 3, Yellow No. 5, Yellow No. 6 and Red No. 40 — so, start your engines; this is gonna be a whole debate.

Alice Callahan, The New York Times

Dinosaurs

The Atlantic Ocean wasn’t always there, and in the time of the dinosaurs, South America was nestled up to Africa, with the continents’ eastern and western coastlines right next to each other as neighbors. About 140 million years ago, they started to drift apart, the tectonic plates upon which they sit shifting and giving way to the South Atlantic. But before that, northeastern Brazil directly linked up with Cameroon along the Gulf of Guinea, and a remarkable new discovery connects matching trails of dinosaur footprints — 260 matching dinosaur footprints from the Early Cretaceous Period — on either side of the Atlantic that scientists believe may have once been the very same trail. They are now 3,700 miles apart.

Ashley Strickland, CNN

Niches

One side effect of every single platform having a different metric for what defines a single view — 30 seconds of viewing on YouTube, two seconds of video taking up half the screen on X, whatever Nielsen intuits based on their sample group for prime time television — is that nobody knows what is actually popular anymore. Perhaps one way to deal with this is to give up, stop seeking out popular stuff, and live as Gen Z does and just enjoy the niche fandoms we find ourselves in. According to survey data from YouTube Insights, 43 percent of Gen Z audiences are in a fandom that nobody in their personal life has heard of, and 53 percent of them create content for those niche fandoms. Good for them.

Julia Alexander, Posting Nexus

Insects

It’s the general consensus that even though we know of 1 million species of insects, the true number of insect species likely vastly exceeds that. The consensus figure is 5 million species — that is, another 4 millions species that have yet to be discovered — but estimates range from 2 million species to over 100 million. A new study went to the Australian tropical rainforests and inventoried all the bark beetles they could find, and found 107 unique species of them. Of those, 58 were as yet undescribed by science. What’s potentially more significant, though — and more important for the undiscovered 1 million, 4 million, 99 million, whatever — is that the newly described ones were rarer, smaller, and more likely to be at risk of extinction as a result.

Griffith University

Corn Sweat

Right now, there’s a lot of moist air coming up into the American Midwest from the Gulf of Mexico, but another thing is going down as well that’s cranking up the humidity: corn sweat, which is when corn and soybeans and other crops eject moisture as the temperature increases. That moisture is making things sticky, with dew points in the 60s and 70s and heat indices projected to reach 105 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

Andrea Thompson, Scientific American

Crust

Cryptobiotic soil known as biocrust covers an estimated 12 percent of the land surface of the planet, a collection of organisms and bacteria that can create a livable environment for fungi, lichens, algae, mosses and bacteria even in the most otherwise inhospitable sandy desert. It’s compared to a living skin for desert land, protecting soils. Decades ago little was understood about them, and while today loads of scientific progress has been made, there’s still much to learn. One thing that is known is that climate models project that in the next 65 years, climate change might wipe out 25 percent to 40 percent of that fragile biocrust, as warming and unpredictable rainfall make their already tenuous habitats unsurvivable.

Jude Coleman, Knowable Magazine

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