Much obliged

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Airline profits expected to be smaller even as ticket prices rise; Europe’s top road trips for spotting wildlife from the road; and the odds of finding this “ghost lobster” are 1-in-100-million.

Let’s get into it!

Travel demand has remained as resilient as anything, even in the face of soaring airfare costs driven by jet fuel shortages and the need for airlines to cut certain types of flights to keep their margins in a manageable condition.

For customers, that’s expected to mean higher prices as the fuel shortage continues; for airlines, profits are expected to be weaker.

Revenues have skyrocketed over the last year. According to the latest inflation data, airfares were up 23.4% in August compared to the same month last year, and according to travel site Hopper, the average cost for airfare over the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend was up 31% year-over-year as of last week.

Still, airline costs are soaring even more, creating the strange scenario in which revenues are setting records, but profits are shrinking.

“With elevated energy prices and refining margins for jet fuel persisting, we expect capacity growth ambitions will be meaningfully curtailed by most management teams, with some potentially providing early expectations on 2027 planning assumptions,” Barclays airline analyst Brandon Oglenski said in a note on Sept. 28.

Car rental company Avis compiled a list of the top ten road trips tourists can take to spot Europe’s most breathtaking wildlife right out of the passenger seat window, and there are some doozies.

Topping the list is New Forest, which is in the south of England just off the English Channel. It’s a 32km drive, the best part of which only takes about an hour, and it’s likely to produce plenty of free-roaming ponies. You can listen to the Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses while literally driving by wild horses.

There are also plenty of deer, particularly in October while they participate in mating rituals. Fallow, buzzards, and other pretty birds fly over and curiously investigate those passing through their homes.

The New Forest route scored 93 out of 100 on Avis’ road trip wildlife index, making it the far-and-away highest-ranked trip on the list.

Scoring 80 out of 100, Denmark’s Wadden Sea route came in second place, largely for the convening of sea creatures along the shore, including seals, porpoises, sea birds, and the visuals of the sea itself.

On top of that, at this time of year, you’ll likely catch a glimpse of the Black Sun phenomenon, in which starlings crowd ahead of their migration, flying in awe-striking wavey patterns that are large enough to block out the sun.

You can view the full top ten list here.

A study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science by researchers at the University of Arizona suggests the aging brain’s memory functions don’t decline, but they adapt by prioritizing different types of memories.

Episodic memory includes things like what time an appointment is, or what items must be picked up at the grocery store. These types of memories are stored in, and controlled by the hippocampus region.

Conversely, semantic memory is stored in, and controlled by the frontal cortex, which includes things like the rules of football or each of the capital cities across a continent.

Episodic memory seemingly declines as people age, but the researchers proposed a different way of looking at it.

"Prevailing theories of cognitive aging depict late life as a period of compensatory decline – an effort to preserve performance despite progressive neural deterioration," the wrote in the study.

"We propose instead that aging represents a continuation of development: a genetically conserved, adaptive reorganization of memory systems that parallels the brain's earlier-life transitions."

They also found such reorganizations occur in the animal world as well, suggesting there may be an evolutionary purpose to prioritizing semantic memory in old age — it helps us retain important information to be passed down to the next generation.

In August we reported on a lobster named Oscar that was half black and half orange. His odds of existing were about 1 in 50 million, according to Dalhousie University’s Beaty Centre for Marine Biodiversity.

Just a wee bit southward, this “ghost lobster” was donated to the University of New England the other day by the Maine State Aquarium.

Aptly named Casper, this little guy is twice as rare as Oscar, with the odds of discovery estimated at 1-in-100-million.

He was donated to the University of New England’s Arthur P. Girard Marine Science Center for researchers to extract some of his DNA to learn how such a unique and stunning colour scheme could end up coating an everyday crustacean like the American lobster.

That’s not to say they’ve become more common, but rather that researchers have been on the lookout. That’s what led to Oscar’s discovery, along with Peaches, a 1-in-30-million orange lobster, and of course Casper, the friendly ghost lobster who arrived just in time for Halloween.

For years, Metallica has been upholding its end of the bargain: when the band plays 2 shows on weekends, each show has a completely distinct setlist.

That deal has followed the California thrashers to the Vegas Sphere, where their residency began over the weekend to raving reviews.

The highlight of the first weekend was without a doubt the accompanying animations that lit up the state-of-the-art venue’s thousands of screens when the band played Ride The Lightning’s final track, The Call of Ktulu, on Friday night.

The epic track is purely instrumental, and as its name suggests, is intended to evoke images of the mythological Kraken-like sea monster. The visuals at the Sphere did not disappoint.

Last year, Lars Ulrich emphasized the potential for eye-popping animations when discussing the band’s aspirations to play the Sphere.

“It’s gonna be challenging…it’s overwhelming and f—ing intimidating,” he said. “But … we have a tendency to put ourselves in environments that we completely control and know. And so I think it’s really good to be able to throw yourself for a loop like that.”

Saturday night’s performance included The Outlaw Torn off Load, and Devil’s Dance off Reload, neither of which they’d played for seven years and 18 years, respectively.

Two dates down, 22 to go!

Calling all TV nerds

It’s time for another game of which came first! We’re quizzin’ you on how well you know the timelines of some of our fave TV shows, with today’s trivia!