By Walt Hickey

Outlast

The scourge of inflation is striking at the heart of the very firmament of American society, the bedrock upon which our social contracts are based, the foundation of our values: reality television. For what are we without the American dream, specifically the one where you win a fortune on a game or reality show? With institutions such as Survivor — the top non-sports program in the adult demo — about to enter its 50th season, it’s worth observing that the prize for winning remains firmly at $1 million after 25 years. In context, the buying power of this $1 million would have amounted to $534,850 in the 2000s when the show originally aired. Naturally, people don’t play Survivor for the money, they play it for the love of the game and the thrill of victory, nevertheless, it’s hard to look at the state of reality television and see a prize pool keeping up with the times. American Idol cut its cash prize down from $1 million in its early seasons to just $250,000 now. Top Chef is an exception, increasing its purse from $100,000 in 2006 to $250,000 today. This stagnation has made things ripe for disruption and is one reason impresarios like Mr. Beast can buy appeal by offering an impressive $10 million prize pool for Beast Games.

James Hibberd, The Hollywood Reporter

Roboumps

Major League Baseball is experimenting with an Automated Ball-Strike system, specifically one at Salt River Fields, where the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies meet for spring training. The system under testing works like so: teams get two challenges per game where they can question the call of the ump, they then throw the question to the Hawk-Eye tracking system and if the challenging team is right, they don’t even have to give up the challenge. So far 13 of the ABS systems have been installed in ballparks — five in Arizona and eight in Florida — in what’s hoped to be a rehearsal for a league-wide implementation across all 30 MLB ballparks as early as the 2026 season.

Barry M. Bloom, Sportico

Peregrine Falcons

The nests of Peregrine Falcons are distressingly empty in North America, with scientists and habitat preservation officials raising the alarm about the fastest bird in the air. A Peregrine expert who monitors their nesting sites along the Yukon River in Alaska reported that 20 of 60 nesting sites were empty, and a dozen more were missing a parent in 2023. This prompted more monitoring, with similar findings across the continent: 22 of the 44 nesting peregrines in New Jersey went missing last season, a dozen out of the 70 in Virginia were missing and Quebec’s Peregrine population saw reproductive success fall from 50 percent to 30 percent in 2022. The fear — for which there is evidence, but insufficiently conclusive evidence at this time — is that this trend is related to the avian influenza going around. Given that the falcons will hunt other birds, they may be more vulnerable than other species to the virus.

Evert Lindquist, bioGraphic

Black Plastic

An eventually retracted study suggesting kitchenware made out of black plastic might have elevated levels of dangerous chemicals sent waves through the kitchenware market, even as a denominator error in the study pulled it from credibility. If there’s a brand synonymous with black plastic kitchenware, it’s probably Oxo, which sells 1 in 12 kitchen utensils in the United States. The company maintains that its wares are safe, but they see the winds shifting. For the four weeks ending January 2025, stainless steel kitchen utensils were up 13 percent year over year, silicone was up 70 percent, and plastic nylon cookware was indeed down 23 percent.

Leslie Patton, Bloomberg

Toho

Iconic Japanese studio Toho, which has been the steward of the Godzilla franchise for decades, is seeing fast growth in its cinema and anime business. Box office receipts last year hit 91.3 billion yen (US$610 million), which was not only a record but even beat out banner years for the company like 2016 when it released Your Name and Shin Godzilla. Last year, 7 out of the top 10 movies in Japan came from Toho, with its new Detective Conan movie and the Haikyu!! movie leading the pack. The studio is currently generating 15 twelve-episode seasons of anime in-house and wants to get that number up to 30 seasons by 2032. The studio is riding a big wave for anime, and not just inside Japan as it projects that the global anime market will hit $600 billion in 2030.

Takuro Suzuki, Nikkei Asia

Phosphorus

New research suggests that “soda lakes” may have been instrumental in life’s emergence on Earth. The thinking goes that a key bottleneck for getting the chemicals needed for life is phosphorous. This bottleneck has been long described as the “phosphorus problem,” as the origin of life would have needed a lot of phosphate, and bodies of water typically have a phosphate concentration that is 10,000 times too low to brew up an ideal primordial soup. Soda lakes are one location where this could work, though, according to a study in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta,

Robert F. Service, Science

The Kingdom and the Power

The age-old crosstown rivalry between Universal and Disney in Orlando will enter a new phase this year when Universal opens up its new Epic Universe park featuring Nintendo, Harry Potter and more. It advances its long quest to compete with Disney and become a god in central Florida. In 2023 — the most recent year for which there is data — Universal’s parks attracted 61 million visitors worldwide, an increase of 70 percent from a decade ago. This is a far faster growth than the Disney parks which only saw a 7 percent increase over the same period to 142 million visitors. The current estimate from MoffettNathanson is that the new Epic Universe park would poach a million visitors from Disney World from mid-2025 to 2026.

Brooks Barnes, The New York Times

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