The wackiest headlines from the week as they would appear in a Classifieds section.

Careers

COASTERBEARER: Six Flags in New Jersey is sending two of its most iconic coasters out to pasture. The Kingda Ka and Green Lantern will be retired and given the traditional coaster sendoff of securing dynamite under the lap bars.

BONE HARVESTER: Well, it’s the marrow they want, not the whole thing. A biotech startup is working to collect bone marrow from recently deceased bodies, freeze it, and make it available for patients who need transplants.

Personal

ISO THE JIM TO MY PAM: John Krasinski was named People’s Sexiest Man Alive for 2024. *Stares blankly at camera.*

PURINA IS UR FRIEND: The Nestlé-owned pet food company is creating a Purina-branded game in Roblox to attract younger customers. The game involves adopting a dog, raising it, and fighting with your partner about who has to take it out at 1am when it has diarrhea.

For sale

NICHE CHANNEL: Step aside Disney+ and Netflix—highly specific streamers like Hallmark+, Crunchyroll, and BritBox are growing in popularity. While they may not have the subscriber numbers of the brand names, active subscriptions for smaller, niche streamers have grown 20% so far this year, compared to 7% for the big guys.

AI DATING ADVICE: Haliey Welch, the “Hawk Tuah” girl, released an app that uses AI to offer dating advice, suggest date spots based on location, and rate your texts on a scale of 1–100 for flirtiness. Can’t believe we paid $7 to get a 29 score on this newsletter.

Photo of the week

Four California residents are facing a unique fraud charge. They’re accused of wearing the pictured bear costume, crawling inside vehicles, and defacing the interior with the intent of falsely claiming a poor, innocent bear did it. According to the California Department of Insurance, the scam cost insurance companies around $140,000.

A biologist looked at videos of the alleged “bear” in a Rolls-Royce and two Mercedes and concluded, “it was clearly a human in a bear suit,” the insurance department said. The suit includes metal hand claws that damaged the seats and the reputation of law-abiding bears everywhere.—DL

Dept. of Progress

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even eat more flavorful BLTs.

Scientists gene-edited sweeter tomatoes. There may be no more bland beefsteaks one day: A team of agricultural researchers in China managed to produce tomatoes with as much as 30% more natural sugar than regularly grown tomatoes without sacrificing the size of the harvest. They used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to identify and disable what they call “the sugar brake genes”—two genes that have been found to target sugar-producing enzymes for destruction in domesticated tomatoes. In wild tomatoes, different versions of these genes do the opposite, allowing sugar-producing enzymes to flourish, and scientists think this changed when we started breeding the fruits to grow larger. The new CRISPR tomatoes might not make it to grocery stores for another three to five years, the team estimated.

🪸 Divers discover the ocean’s largest coral. This is like finding “the world’s tallest tree” after thinking there was “nothing left to discover on planet Earth,” according to Enric Sala, founder of the National Geographic team that stumbled upon something enormous near Australia. In the Solomon Islands, divers found the biggest coral reef ever recorded—longer than a blue whale, wide enough to fit two basketball courts, and somehow undetected for the 300 to 500 years it’s been there. The discovery is a rare bright spot—warming ocean temperatures killed reefs in at least 62 countries/territories between 2023 and the beginning of this year. It was the world’s fourth instance of mass coral bleaching since 1998.

Nuclear time-keeping is one step closer to reality. Think Interstellar, not power-plant-on-your-wrist. Physicists just made a breakthrough in developing an ultraprecise method of timekeeping that could help crack some of the most mind-boggling question marks in the universe, like dark matter and the relation between gravity and time. Timekeeping is typically measured by the pulses of something called cesium atoms—one second is 9,192,631,770 oscillations of that atom. Currently, the world’s most precise clock gets more exact by measuring strontium atoms, which pulse 50,000 times faster than cesium atoms. The new nuclear clock that scientists are trying to develop takes it a step further, measuring the nucleus of a radioactive atom that ticks almost five times faster than strontium atoms. Scientists say uber-precise time measuring could shed new light on particle-level interactions in matter.—ML

Escaped monkeys raise legal and moral questions

Some of the 43 monkeys that recently escaped from a research facility in South Carolina are still hanging around the town, and some animal rights experts say their legal status is as fuzzy as their tails.

Before the mass monkey exodus—the result of a caretaker neglecting to lock an enclosure—the rhesus macaques inarguably belonged to Alpha Genesis, a company that breeds lab monkeys for biomedical research. Prized as experiment subjects due to their physiological proximity to humans, the primates can cost as much as $60,000 each.

But as local officials search for the remaining escapees in the surrounding neighborhood, animal law experts Angela Fernandez and Justin Marceau have claimed in Vox that the furry creatures could be legally free.

• They argue that a 19th century precedent from New York State can be interpreted to mean that Alpha Genesis isn’t entitled to get its monkeys back, even if someone catches them.
• Fernandez and Marceau claim a sympathizer can legally take the fugitives to a nearby sanctuary (or one run by animal rights charity Born Free USA, which has called on Alpha Genesis to let the escaped monkeys come live at its facility in Texas).

The monkeys already have an ally in Congress. Republican House Rep. Nancy Mace, who represents the district where the primates currently reside, accused Alpha Genesis of running "painful and deadly experiments," noting that federal regulators have previously cited the company for mishandling the animals.

Who owns a runaway animal?

The case for the free status of the macaques belonging to Alpha Genesis lies in the dusty depths of legal libraries, according to Fernandez and Marceau.

• In an 1805 case over a hunting dispute, Pierson v. Post, the New York State Supreme Court ruled that pursuit of a wild animal doesn’t establish one’s ownership of it, citing Roman and medieval jurisprudence.
• Almost a century later, a verdict in the New York case Mullett v. Bradley established that an escaped animal is no longer considered the property of its owner.

While legal challenges to the ownership of escaped monkeys remain hypothetical, animal rights activists have recently challenged the status of other creatures in captivity. Colorado’s top court is due to rule on whether zoo elephants have a right to sue for their freedom in the same way that human prisoners do.

The animal rights group NonHuman Rights Project that initiated the legal action lost a similar lawsuit in New York State on behalf of an elephant at the Bronx Zoo in 2022.

Calls to stop the monkey business

The South Carolina monkey chase raises more existential questions around the use of sentient beings for lab experiments.

Health researchers agree that non-human primates are invaluable in testing drugs and deepening our understanding of human diseases like cancer and diabetes. But some activists argue that many lab practices amount to unjustifiable animal cruelty and have in recent years appealed to government authorities to end them.

• Over 380 Harvard Law School scholars and animal cognition researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland asked the National Health Institutes to nix some animal research funding, study alternative research methods, and review best practices in response to experiments conducted at Harvard that the signatories deemed unnecessarily cruel to monkey subjects.
• The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine lodged a formal complaint against Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink in 2022, accusing it of running experiments on monkeys that violated the Animal Welfare Act.

Beyond monkeys…there’s emergent evidence that animals other than mammals—fish, reptiles, and insects—might possess consciousness, according to a declaration recently signed by hundreds of scientists, which complicates the ethical calculus of experiments on a wider array of living beings.—SK

Place to be: A celebrity lookalike contest

It’s a big world out there. In this section, we’ll teleport you to an interesting location—and hopefully give you travel ideas in the process.

It’s beginning to look like the final months of 2024 will be defined by celebrity doppleganger contests in cities around the world.

Yesterday, the winner of a Jeremy Allen White lookalike competition that took place on a “big hill” in Humboldt Park in Chicago was awarded $50 and “some cigarettes,” making it the least specific and most nicotine-friendly contest to date during this worldwide trend.

It began innocently enough three weeks ago in New York with a gathering of guys who resemble Timothée Chalamet, which included the star of the Dune movies himself.

The contests proliferated from there: Dublin held one for Paul Mescal, London put out a call for people who resemble Harry Styles, and San Francisco searched for Dev Patel’s non-biological twin.

Why are these things so popular? The easy answer is that Chalamet made a surprise appearance at the first one and now organizers are hoping the famous person shows up at their contest, which hasn’t happened. It’s also inexpensive fun, so let’s enjoy this before Ticketmaster finds a way to charge attendees $75 in administration fees at a lookalike contest for The Rizzler in 2025.—DL

Crowd work

Last week, we asked you to come up with a unique theme park concept. Here are our favorites:

• “Airports. Go through the baggage-sorting underbelly, ride all of the vehicles (including the ones on the runways), practice your best Customer Service Voice, even take over flying the plane when both pilots collapse. Huge potential.”—Tom from Pittsburgh, PA
• “AntLand! It's a massive underground (adult-human-sized) anthill. But instead of dark, claustrophobic tunnels, it's well-lit, see-thru mesh climbing tunnels with snacks! Every day is an opportunity to build new parts of the anthill or go outside and LARP a fight with rival anthills!”—Gil from Madison, WI
• “I’m actually currently working on this exact prompt for my semester project. My team is developing Rattsville, USA, a theme park centered around the adorable varmints. I am in charge of a Wipeout-style obstacle course while other teammates are working on everything from a WWE simulator (with rats) to a water ride that allows you to relive a famous rat war against the hamster.”—Joshua from Hummelstown, PA

This week’s question

If you could give everyone one tip to level up their holiday cooking or baking game in the kitchen, what would it be?

Matty’s answer to get the juices flowing: Get a kitchen scale and start measuring your ingredients in grams—it makes your baking so much easier. Tablespoons, WHO?!

Share your response here.