By Walt Hickey

Spiral

As of Sunday, the latest movie in the Saw franchise, Spiral, earned another $4.5 million in the domestic theatrical market and $2.67 million overseas, which pushed the total aggregate box office for the Saw franchise to $1,000,799,533 globally across the films. That’s remarkable if only because of the ridiculous profit margins given their tiny budgets, which range from $1 million to $20 million a pop. All but one of them has managed to crack $100 million, fairly easily making back their budgets multiple times over.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Fake Reviews

A CBC News analysis of Google’s star rating system for businesses has unearthed a portion of a fake review network, a collection of 208 fake accounts that have posted 3,574 fake reviews on 1,279 businesses across North America. The patterns were clear: pairs of reviews who had serendipitously visited the same random businesses scattered across multiple countries and the continent as a whole, such as of 71 patrons of a Toronto pizzeria, 50 who also used the same lawn care firm and another 20 availing themselves of the services of an Ontario wig store.

Matthew Pierce, Jonathon Gatehouse, Alex Shprintsen and Meara Belanger, CBC News

Anti-Fungal

Fungi can cause serious debilitating illnesses in people the same way that bacteria can, and can spread around the world the same way that a pandemic can. At issue, though, is that the medical toolbox to fight fungi is considerably slimmer than that used to fight bacteria. The challenge is in part due to the reality that fungi cells have more in common with human cells than most bacteria cells have with human cells, so developing a drug that can fight fungi without hurting our own cells is a difficult problem. As a result, there are only five classes of antifungal drugs compared to more than 20 classes of antibiotics, and a new class of antifungals only hits the market every 20 years or so.

Maryn McKenna, Scientific American

Culture Credits

After a successful pilot program from 14 regions of France, the country will roll out a culture pass for 18-year-olds nationwide. Essentially, 800,000 teenagers a year can now download an app and get €300 that can be used for movie tickets, museums, theaters, instructional courses, instruments and all sorts of cultural products. It’ll both boost an economy that needs it, and give teenagers opportunities to engage with a cultural space that is central to French society. Over the two-year test period, of the 164,000 teens who signed up for the culture pass, three-quarters used it at least once, mostly buying books or musical instruments.

BBC News

Vaccine Helper

Over the course of the initial rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in the United States, a number of pop-up vaccine concierge services splashed on to the scene, offering tech-enabled ways to get a shot. Now that the initial scramble has largely subsided in the States amid rampant supply, some are looking back on some of the more fly-by-night vaccine concierges and wondering, hey, was that just a data grab attempt or did it actually help anyone? For instance, the Dr. B service claims 2.5 million sign-ups, though the number of people who actually scored a dose through the service was not particularly abundant, according to an investigation, with the service refusing to say the number of vaccines it actually delivered. Indeed, with just 600 vaccination partners — none with national chains, and less than 1 percent of the more than 80,000 U.S. vaccination sites — it’s unclear what public health achievements the shop logged despite getting health data on millions of desperate people.

Mia Sato, MIT Technology Review

Tardigrades

Tardigrades are notoriously durable, with the microscopic creatures known to survive incredibly high and low temperatures, radiation, vacuums, and all sorts of feats of endurance and survival. In 2019, a mission attempted to send a batch of tardigrades to the moon, but smashed into the surface. New research has grim prospects for the astronaut tardigrades after putting some test subjects into hibernation then firing them at various speeds using a light gas gun to find out what kind of impacts tardigrades can withstand. The limit, per the research, was impacts up to 900 meters per second, and momentary pressures of 1.14 gigapascals, which to be clear is a lot but also likely means the water bears aboard the Beresheet didn’t make it. This has astrobiological implications, as theories about extraterrestrial origins of life on Earth — how microorganisms could move from world to world to seed life — would require life to endure serious impacts.

Jonathan O’Callaghan, Science Magazine

Samsung

The heirs of Lee Kun-hee, the Samsung scion who died late last year, owe $11 billion in inheritance taxes, and will be donating 23,000 works of art amassed by Lee over the course of a lifetime to the South Korean public to draw down that debt. Naturally, cities are lining up to host whatever eventual museum emerges to house the Monets, Picassos, Dalis and more. Daegu, Lee’s birthplace, wants them, as does Busan, which claims it’s his hometown. Yeosu, a city where Lee bought a heart-shaped island in the city limits several years back, is gesturing towards the island and then gesturing at the art and hoping the committee in charge of picking the winner gets the right idea. All told, at least 11 cities have begun vying to house the collection, which is valued at around $2.2 billion.

Dasl Yoon, The Wall Street Journal

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