By Walt Hickey

Das Franchise

Sometimes it’s fun to pop over into other countries’ cinemas just to see what’s crushing it in different parts of the world. German audiences have been clamoring for the absolute box office sensation Die Schule der magischen Tiere 3, which has dominated the German cinema for the past four consecutive weeks. The film, which translates to The School of Magical Animals 3, tells the story of — well, I don’t want to spoil any of the plot here, but let’s just say things get a bit wild. The previous two installments grossed for a combined $36.5 million, and with $16.4 million banked over four weeks, those are apparently the kind of numbers that get Europe positively clamoring for the latest in German comedy, which has already booked distribution in Scandinavia, Hungary, Poland, the Baltics, Israel, Bulgaria, Ex-Yugoslavia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, because European film distribution territories have not changed an inch since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Leo Barraclough, Variety

NBA

The NBA kicks off tonight, which means that finally honest purveyors of beers in major metropolitan arenas have the opportunity to really stick it to their customers. The average price of a beer in an NBA arena has hit $12.57. There’s a fairly wide range in pricing, with the Cleveland Cavaliers coming in at $5.91 per beer and the Oklahoma City Thunder charging $6.84 at the low end, while the Boston Celtics have the temerity to charge $20.32 for a 16-ounce beer. I mean, at least Boston is good this year; the poor Brooklyn Nets have some of the lowest expectations in basketball, but their fans are still paying an unconscionable $15.75 per drink.

Pete O’Connell, VinePair

WNBA

After a stirring championship in which the New York Liberty beat the Minnesota Lynx in a totally clean and well-officiated finale, the players of the WNBA Association have announced they will opt out of the collective bargaining agreement with the league, which sets a 12-month clock to renegotiate a deal. This year was huge for the WNBA, which saw record viewership and the most-watched WNBA Finals in 25 years.

Jacob Feldman, Sportico

Solar

SB Energy announced an 875-megawatt-capacity solar project in Texas, about 70 miles north of Austin, which will contain 1.3 million solar modules. The planned Orion Solar Belt is being built at the behest of Google, which will consume 85 percent of the power for a cloud computing facility outside of Dallas. It’ll end up consisting of three separate solar farms, and it’s one of the largest solar projects ever announced in the United States.

Mika Travis, E&E News

Dredged

Natural harbors make great places for cities, but here’s the thing: cities also make great unnatural harbors on a long enough time span. Indeed, humans have spent decades to centuries tweaking estuaries to suit the needs of trade, commerce and navigation. It’s been a massive boon in many cases, but it’s also got consequences when storms hit and waters rise. In places like New York Harbor, San Francisco Bay, and Miami’s Biscayne Bay, anywhere from 80 percent to 90 percent of the natural habitat has been built over, whether by deepening the channels or building up land that otherwise would ease into the depths. In the Newark Bay of New Jersey, water that was once 10 feet deep is now dredged down to 50 feet deep. That smooth, deep channel during a storm surge can facilitate a lot more flow than a rougher, shallower channel with higher friction.

Philip M. Orton and Stefan Talke, The Conversation

Border

An internal memo from Border Patrol reported that something like 150 out of the 500 cameras that are used to surveil the southern border of the United States are not operational. According to Customs and Border Patrol, the Federal Aviation Administration is responsible for servicing and fixing the cameras. The surveillance system has been a bit of a mess for nearly two decades, according to CBP officials. I, for one, am shocked that a Department of Homeland Security project — home of such stalwarts as the TSA and Secret Service — has turned into an ineffective and expensive boondoggle that has resolutely made anyone who spends a great deal of time interacting with them exhausted.

Gaby Del Valle, The Verge

Asteroids

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and made way for the rise of mammals like us was a massive and globally devastating event, wiping out 75 percent of species. That’s hardly the only time, and not the biggest time, that an impactor hit the Earth and constituted a big reset for the life here; 3.26 billion years ago, a space rock called S2 that was 50 to 200 times as large hit the Earth and blew 10,000 cubic kilometers of rock vapor into the air, a disaster that ended an eon and but seeded the oceans with the nutrients it’d need to boost a biosphere ahead of a massive explosion of life. During that period of time, Earth was getting pretty pummeled: An object larger than the dinosaur killer hit the Earth every 15 million years or so. At the time, Earth was home to 1 percent to 2 percent of the amount of life it has today, but the stuff that survived had a whole lot more iron in the water to fuel the bloom that followed.

Douglas Fox, Scientific American

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