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

Careers

PEE POLICÍA: You’ll have to fork over $785 if caught urinating in the ocean off the Spanish town of Vigo. That doesn’t even include the cost to drain the ocean.

DEFENSIVE BALLPLAYERS WANTED: George Mason’s baseball team made NCAA history by scoring 23 runs in a single inning against Holy Cross, topping the previous record of 21 runs set by Wichita State in 1984 and Penn State in 1983.

ROGUE RANGER: Remaining rangers are working together to record every layoff and termination within the Park Service. Around 1,000 permanent Park Service employees were terminated in February, along with roughly 4,700 others working in related departments like the US Forest Service.

Personal

ISO AVIAN DAYCARE: Jackie and Shadow, two celebrity bald eagles, finally hatched two babies after several years of no luck. The couple is expected to hire George and Amal Clooney’s former au pair.

ISO SNOW: This year’s Iditarod is taking place on the longest course in race history, all because there wasn’t enough snow in Alaska to use the standard track. The race also features only 33 participants, tied for the fewest mushers ever.

RETURN OF THE KING: A kidnapped Paddington Bear statue has been found and its captors arrested in the UK. The perpetrators will be marmalade-ed and feathered.

For sale

SUPER POWER SAW: Business for Mariano ‘Tute’ Di Tella is booming after he created custom chainsaws as cost-cutting props for Argentinian President Javier Milei and Elon Musk. Di Tella said one of inspirations was the horror villain Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

CLASSIC ART: A Flamin’ Hot Cheeto shaped like the Pokémon character Charizard sold at auction for a total of $87,840. The sale solidifies that stumbling into wealth through a mistake by a processed food giant is the new American Dream.

NIGHT-LIGHT CANDY: Mondelez is packing its Sour Patch Kids and Swedish Fish with turmeric-extract to make the candies fluorescent under blacklights. Execs said the stunt was inspired by how much the kids seem to love glow-in-the-dark DJs, but there also has to be a Law and Order: SVU collab in the works.—MM

Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival is a festival known for its extravagant costumes and parades, but there are also winners and losers. Beija-Flor samba school won its 15th carnival parade competition this week with a performance that honored the school’s former director Luiz Fernando Ribeiro do Carmo, who died in 2021 from Covid-19.

The floats featured pyrotechnics and dancers dressed as devils, and was enough to narrowly edge out second-place Grande Rio along with 10 other schools. In a sign that the competition values everyone’s input, the performances take place in front of 40 judges.—DL

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even virtually share the flavor of your meal.

Mouth gadget simulates how food tastes. Send flavs: US-based scientists have developed a device called “e-Taste” that mimics basic flavors so effectively that its wearers matched the taste they were experiencing to its corresponding food—lemonade, cake, fried egg, coffee, and fish soup—with 87% accuracy. The rudimentary gadget pumps edible liquified chemicals to the tongue: glucose for sweetness, citric acid for sourness, sodium chloride for saltiness, magnesium chloride for bitterness, and glutamate for umami. (It can’t yet reproduce spiciness and fattiness.) The device’s developers say e-Taste could one day be used in virtual reality, biomedical research, online shopping, and a range of other fields.

DNA sequencing provides quicker recovery from illness. Doctors in the UK have successfully trialed a system that reads a bacterial infection’s genetic code and identifies the best antibiotic within 48 hours, according to The Guardian. Hospital labs can take up to seven days to figure out most bacterial infections, but some trickier ones might not yield a for-sure diagnosis for weeks. The new DNA sequencing system finds the proper, targeted antibiotic so quickly that it reduces the need for doctors to prescribe broad-spectrum antibiotics—which increase a person’s risk of developing antibiotic resistance—in the meantime. Less antibiotic resistance in the general population is critical, because it lowers the chances of a treatment-resistent superbug emerging.

Human efforts are helping heal the ozone layer. A team of scientists led by MIT and supported by NASA has confirmed that the big hole in the ozone over Antarctica is shrinking. Even better: After reviewing 15 years of records, the scientists are 95% certain that Earth’s shield against the sun is mainly healing thanks to worldwide reductions in emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which are substances that damage the ozone layer. “It shows we can actually solve environmental problems,” one of the study’s authors said. At this rate, the Antarctic ozone hole could close completely within some of our lifetimes.—ML

Conditions are tempestuous for Uncle Sam’s weather watchers after the Trump Administration recently slashed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) workforce.

The federal agency includes the National Weather Service (NWS), which is responsible for tracking the weather with fancy gadgets like satellites and sensors that provide data for its sophisticated forecast models, to inform the forecasts you see on TV or on your phone. It also has experts researching the climate, as well as monitoring natural phenomena from hurricanes to geomagnetic storms. Now, the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is taking the agency by storm.

But the downsizing could be part of a bigger shakeup: Trump advisors have suggested weather forecasting should be outsourced to for-profit companies. But the idea of ending the government telling Americans when they need an umbrella for free would upend 150 years of tradition.

Why commercialize weather forecasts?

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees the NOAA, said at his Senate confirmation hearing last month, that while he won’t dismantle the аgency, he thinks that NWS can “deliver the product more efficiently and less expensively.”

While it’s unclear what Lutnick envisioned exactly, Project 2025, a policy blueprint that Trump has partially adopted that was produced by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, called for a breakup of the NOAA, accusing it of fostering climate alarmism.

• Though it doesn’t propose axing the National Weather Service entirely, it suggests it should “focus on its data-gathering services,” while leaving forecasting to private companies.
• Project 2025 says that studies show companies produce more accurate weather reports than the government, which it states should utilize more private partnerships when it comes to reading the clouds.

What’s the current temperature at NOAA?

With a possible turn to the private sector forecasting looming, Musk’s chainsawing affected over 10% of NOAA’s workforce as DOGE works to cut government costs and eliminate what it considers waste and fraud.

• DOGE removed 800 NOAA employees last week, while an additional 500 resigned voluntarily in exchange for several months of pay.
• The government is also reportedly considering canceling leases on two NWS facilities, including a center in Maryland that is instrumental to forecasting. The administration told Axios that it’s reviewing the leases, but not currently canceling them.

The cuts reportedly left the agency understaffed, hamstringing weather forecasting and halting certain operations like the launch of weather balloons at one Alaska facility, according to the New York Times.

Cloudy prospects and a chance of failure?

As NOAA shrinks, some weather wonks say that a private-public meteorology partnership already exists.

• Private weather forecasters like AccuWeather rely on government weather data, as well as NWS’ forecasting models for their product.
• Private companies also collect weather data, which the National Weather Service often buys to supplement its own findings.

AccuWeather has opposed fully privatizing forecasting, saying that that the agency plays an important role in alerting Americans of extreme weather events. Meanwhile, Veteran TV meteorologist Dan Satterfield told the Atlantic that the NWS often put out tornado alerts before he could warn viewers on air.

And weather scientists say that NOAA’s work on modeling catastrophic events like hurricanes has made forecasts more accurate.

Critics of fully private forecasting are also worried that not having free government forecasts could leave poorer counties unable to afford quality weather warnings—which could lead to information gaps in areas vulnerable to tornadoes or hurricanes. Among the doubters is Trump’s nominee to lead the NOAA, Neil Jacobs, who says companies might not want to take on the legal liability of being the sole disaster alerter.

While the idea of limiting NWS to a weather-tracking function is meant to save taxpayer dollars, skeptics point out that NWS operations cost just $4 per American each year, while providing free data that saves thousands of lives and allows businesses to plan around the weather to avoid immense losses. And they note that the stakes are high: natural disasters caused $183 billion worth of damages in the US last year, according to data from the NCEI, and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent in the US due to climate change.

Zoom Out: Weather forecasting isn’t the only possible target for privatization. Musk has suggested that other candidates could include the Post Office and Amtrak train service, NBC News reported.—SK

Yesterday was the final day of the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference at MIT, an annual event that has drawn some of the sports world’s sharpest minds for nearly two decades.

The ideas introduced at what has been dubbed “Dorkapalooza” by their leader Bill Simmons have revolutionized sports leagues, although now many are wondering if these nerds are doing more harm than good.

For those of you who aren’t consumed by fantasy leagues, the sports analytics movement has essentially streamlined how games are played and has made teams more efficient and productive. But it might have come at a cost—a decline in entertainment value in some leagues.

• In baseball, the dorks (complimentary) learned hitters should be swinging for the fences on more pitches, which resulted in a glut of home runs and strikeouts and fewer balls in play. The decline in TV ratings and attendance has been attributed to the subsequent lack of action.
• In basketball, the people with big brains realized a 3-pointer is worth 50% more than a 2-pointer (this seems obvious now), and teams started taking the long-distance shots in abundance. This season, a ratings drop has coincided with the number of 3-point attempts rising 104% compared to the 2011–12 season.

It’s not all bad news for entertainment value: Analytics has driven NFL teams to go for it more on fourth downs and eschew punting. In 2011, football teams attempted fourth-down conversions 430 times; last season, that number spiked to 766.—DL