There’s two orcas going around killing great white sharks to eat their livers

Hi there. Welcome to the first edition of Brain Slop — a new newsletter from The Omnicosm that’s all about random news from the Internet.

Each edition of Brain Slop will hit your email on Sunday mornings, offering a rundown of fun reads that I came across over the past week. This newsletter will cover topics that Popculturology, its sibling newsletter about pop culture, doesn’t. Tech, science, sports … dinosaurs.

If you’re receiving this edition of brain slop, it’s because you’re an elite subscriber to Popculturology and Snackology. (If Brain Slop isn’t your thing, head over to your account page to remove it from your subscriptions.)

I’m kicking off this inaugural edition of Brain Slop with one of my favorite topics: The ocean. More specifically, why it’s time for us to stick to land.

Seriously. Killer whales are teaming up to destroy yachts. (And branching off into new species.) We have no idea just how intelligent octopi really are. Sharks might be talking now. (And this is all without discussing how dolphins are a bunch of perverts.) It’s probably time for us to give up on the ocean. Sharks don’t come into our homes. Let’s leave theirs alone.

Speaking of sharks, a new story out this past week tells the story of how great white sharks — one of the apex predators of the sea — is now being hunted by another apex predator. (No, not man.)

On her June 2023 voyage into Mossel Bay, [shark expert Ester Jacobs] didn’t know that danger still lurked below. Then she spotted Port and Starboard — and watched the latter stalk a great white, disembowel its liver and then show off his gruesome trophy to a human audience on a nearby boat.

Over the past few years, people along the South African coast have found an increasing number of shark carcasses — beginning with the smaller sevengill shark before the great white sharks — with “a gaping wound on its underbelly near the pectoral fins.” The strangest part of these finds? The hearts, stomachs and other major organs in these shark carcasses were left alone … but their livers were gone.

After originally suspecting humans as the culprit, scientists realized that killer whales — a duo named Port and Starboard, specifically — were the, well, killers.

It was a shocking discovery. Killer whales eat a wide range of food as a species, from fish to squid to marine mammals such as seals. But different groups often have specialized diets based on culture. While orcas had been documented eating sharks, instances of them targeting bigger ones at the top of the food chain were rarer.

Yeah, Free Willy clearly got some things wrong. Despite those giant, cute eyes, orcas are stone cold killers. They’ll trash your boats. They’ll eat your livers. Hopefully by leading off the first ever edition of brain slop with them, they’ll understand just how much I respect them.

📖 Two killer whales are hunting great white sharks — to eat their livers (Jonathan Edwards, The Washington)

the links

tech

• OpenAI’s viral Studio Ghibli moment highlights AI copyright concerns (Maxwell Zeff, TechCrunch): “In a statement to TechCrunch, an OpenAI spokesperson says that while ChatGPT refuses to replicate ‘the style of individual living artists,’ OpenAI does permit it to replicate ‘broader studio styles.’ Of course, it’s worth noting there are living artists who are credited with pioneering their studio’s unique styles, such as Studio Ghibli’s co-founder, Hayao Miyazaki.”
• Elon Musk’s xAI buys Elon Musk’s X for $33 billion on paper (Richard Lawler, The Verge): “Despite failing so far to make X an ‘everything app,’ Musk has tied these two ventures together closely since launching xAI in the summer of 2023, saying that access to the vast trove of data from Twitter / X would give it a major advantage, and prominently placing xAI’s Grok tool within the social app. This week, Grok launched an integration beyond X, joining Telegram.”

• DNA of 15 Million People for Sale in 23andMe Bankruptcy (Jason Koehler, 404 Media): “The filing is a devastating reminder that once you give your genetic information to a company like 23andMe, there is no way to have any clue what is going to happen to that data, how it is going to be analyzed, how it is going to be monetized, how it is going to be protected from hackers, and who it is going to be shared with for profit. Sharing your own DNA with 23andMe also necessarily implicates your close family members, who may or may not want their genetic information submitted to a company that is financially precarious and sitting on a trove of highly sensitive information.”

food

• RIP, Hooters, Last Vestige of a More Honest Age of Sleaze (Lauren Bans, GQ): “The restaurant isn’t even a cultural punchline anymore, because it simply doesn’t feel like a part of modern culture. It’s a souvenir from a time when men got all hot in their pants for bikini car washes and Jennifer Love Hewitt. A joke in movies from the era when Katy Perry still sang about various things being ‘so gay.’ It’s where George W. Bush went to get a sad cheeseburger after vainly declaring “Mission Accomplished.” (I don’t think this is true, but it feels true in my heart.)”
• Why Smartfood Popcorn Doesn’t Hit Like It Used To (Jaya Saxena, Eater): “At first, I assumed this is just what being 38 feels like. Is anything as good as it used to be? Perhaps Smartfood only tasted good because I could eat it by the fistful while watching Muppet Babies and I didn’t know what a calorie was and I didn’t have a job. I loved it with an intensity that feels impossible to achieve in adulthood, one only possible because I literally had nothing else to put my mind to.”

science

• Sneeze smarter, not louder: The science of a quieter sneeze (Teddy Amenabar, Álvaro Valiño and Artur Galocha, The Washington Post): “A huge sneeze can feel satisfying for some people, and many self-identified loud sneezers aren’t interested in lowering the volume. Some say they’ll quiet the sound in public but prefer to sneeze with abandon when possible. Kathryn DeVinney, 41, a social worker who lives in New York, says it feels better to let out her “scream” sneeze.
• Ancient wasp may have used its rear end to trap flies (Chris Simms, New Scientist): “‘This is a truly unique discovery,’ says Manuel Brazidec at the University of Rennes in France. ‘What I find extraordinary is that the abdomen of Sirenobethylus charybdisis a brand new solution to a problem that all parasitoid insects have: how do you get your host to stop moving while you lay your eggs on or in it?’”
• Chewing Gum Releases Thousands of Microplastics Into Our Saliva, Researchers Find (Margherita Bassi, Gizmodo): “Scientists have previously estimated that people ingest at least 50,000 microplastics a year. Given this evaluation, Mohanty and his colleagues decided to investigate the amount of microplastics that’s being released by chewing gum. They tested 10 commercially available brands: five synthetic gums and five natural gums. To avoid having to consider different salivas and chewing patterns, the team had a single participant chew seven pieces of each brand.”

dinosaurs

• Weird Mongolian dinosaur wielded ‘big, sharp and nasty’ claws (Will Dunham, Reuters): “Duonychus was a medium-sized member of a group of awkward-looking dinosaurs called therizinosaurs, which were known for having a rotund torso, long neck, small head, bipedal stance, feathers on the body and massive claws on the hands. While they were part of the dinosaur clade called theropods that included all the meat-eaters such as Tyrannosaurus and Spinosaurus, therizinosaurs preferred plants on their menu.”

family

• Welcome to the Preschool Plague Years (Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker): “As you know if you have a kid of your own, the collective noun for “toddler” is “superspreader.” At any given moment, half of all children under four are harboring a horrid illness while the other half are engaging in behavior so hygienically compromising it boggles the adult imagination. Never mind some contemplative thumb-sucking or the frank excavation of hardened snot from a stuffy nose; I am talking about the evolutionarily inexplicable instinct to touch things that should never be touched and taste things that should never be tasted. These latter include — to sample from Reddit threads with titles like “What has your small child licked recently?”—shopping carts, toilet seats, the bottoms of shoes, a flyswatter covered in freshly smashed fly, and the floors of airports, gas stations, and hospital waiting rooms. Nor do children reliably stop at mere licking. There are kids alive and well today who have eaten dead cockroaches, cat vomit, raccoon poop, used Band-Aids, and the blood-filled absorbent material in a package of raw chicken. I know of one child who ate her baby sister’s umbilical cord when it fell off.”

sports

• Did Yankees’ physicist-designed ‘torpedo’ bats play role in 9-HR power surge vs. Brewers? (Jack Baer, Yahoo! Sports): “Apparently, the Yankees’ front office has crafted a new sort of bat that basically moves some of the wood lower down on the barrel, putting more mass in the area that actually strikes the ball. It basically makes the end of the bat more shaped like a bowling pin.”

• Who will win the 2025 World Series? Our staff predicts the MLB champions, MVP and Cy Young (Chad Jennings, The Athletic): “Of the 16 writers who picked the Dodgers to win the National League, all but two picked them to go on and win the World Series. But still, 14 out of 33 is not a majority, meaning most of our voters picked someone other than the obvious preseason favorite to win the whole thing.”

a cartoon