By Walt Hickey

Card Game

Because we’ve societally completely run out of ideas and are just desperate to string together enough proper nouns you might like in order to sell some cards, Hasbro will release a 111-card game for two to five players where the object is to collect different items to earn points, and they will call it MONOPOLY Deal: Harry Potter, despite having barely anything to do with the board game Monopoly at this point. It’s like one of those beautiful yet tragic orchids that persist long after the extinction of the insect that once pollinated them and which they thus resemble as an echo through evolution: It involves the only vaguely related gameplay of the spin-off card game MONOPOLY Deal, except with all the MONOPOLY boiled out of it and replaced with the intellectual property of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, a branded copy of a reinterpretation of a game which still wears its old face. The manufacturer’s suggested retail price is $6.99. They’re also finally releasing MONOPOLY: Pokémon Edition, which I have no internal qualms about — that’s sick.

William Niebling, ICv2

Monkeys

In the latest story idly playing on the radio in the background during a science-fiction movie, 43 monkeys have escaped from a South Carolina medical research facility and are now loose in the Yemassee, South Carolina, area. They weigh about 7 pounds, are young females, and the local authorities insist they are skittish and “not infected with any disease whatsoever.” Neighbors have been encouraged to shut their doors and windows, while handlers will attempt to coax the Rhesus macaques back with fruit. This seems to happen a lot: 26 primates escaped from the facility in 2014, then there was another breakout of 19 in 2016, and then it was fined in 2018 related to escape of “dozens of primates.”

Jeffrey Collins, The Associated Press

Scorpions

In Brazil, higher temperatures, warming habitats, and increases in urbanization next to previously wild areas have combined for a sharp spike in scorpion stings, with scorpions becoming the most lethal poisonous animal in Brazil. The temperature increase means that scorpion metabolism is way up, which makes them more active and, thus, feistier. Last year, 152 deaths from scorpion stings exceeded the 140 deaths from snakebites in the country, and that’s significantly more scorpion-related fatalities than in 2019, when 95 people died from scorpions. According to the health ministry, there were over 200,000 scorpion sting incidents in Brazil last year, averaging 550 stings per day.

Carlos Fabal and Juan Sebastian Serrano, Agence France-Presse

Geoglyphs

Over the past several decades, anthropologists have documented 430 geoglyph symbols etched into the deserts of Peru, the most famous of which are the Nazca lines, which can be as large as a football field. The geoglyphs are found in the Nazca Pampa, a 150-square-mile area, and are made up of large, figurative geoglyphs 300 feet in length on average (the Nazca Lines) as well as smaller ones that average 30 feet. A new study fed aerial photography into artificial intelligence software, which flagged 1,300 areas that could have been a geoglyph heretofore undiscovered. A field survey in 2022 confirmed 303 of them are indeed new geoglyphs, while many of the rest remain under investigation.

Aylin Woodward, The Wall Street Journal

Heat

At a certain temperature, it’s actually worse to use a fan than not use a fan to cool off, a temperature at which the evaporative effect of moving air across the body gives way to the effect seen in a convection oven. Fascinatingly, we do not know what this temperature is. The CDC says you shouldn’t use fans when it’s hotter than 32.2 C (90 F), while the WHO puts it at 40 C (104 F). Two new studies generally provide answers, which is good. Specifically, they provide different answers, which is not good. One says there’s little additional benefit of a fan above 35 C (95 F), while the other said that fans relieved cardiac stress by 31 percent in the elderly even at 38 C (100 F). Anyway, we hope this clears it up.

Warren Cornwall, Science

Fruit Flies

Two cities in California were placed under quarantine after an outbreak of an invasive fruit fly that can attack over 230 crops, meaning that fruit from within the quarantine region can’t be distributed outside of it. It’s an 87-square-mile zone in Orange County. After reaching maturity, the fruit fly adults live for 90 days on decaying fruit, honeydew melon, and plant nectar, and the adults are capable of traveling 30 miles in their quest to lay eggs and find food, a worrying range.

Karen Garcia, Los Angeles Times

How Far You’ll Go

Moana 2 comes out on November 27, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and is currently projected to make between $125 million and $135 million over the five-day weekend, which would be a record. That’s also the week after Wicked and Gladiator 2 come out, meaning the box office ought to be humming by the end of the month after being dead since the flop of Joker 2. The current record for biggest Thanksgiving weekend gross is $93.6 million, held by Frozen, so if the tracking is even close to right you’re looking at a new record. The movie was originally set to be a television show but was reworked into a movie.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

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