The Know Daily - Monday 11 March 2024

_{Read in 5m 24s∙ Listening to Norah Jones ∙}

A gray whale that vanished from the Atlantic Ocean in the 19th century was recently spotted off the coast of New England in the US. Scientists who identified the whale - which had previously been hunted to near extinction - described the experience as “wild and exciting”. 

🏆 Oscars 2024 recap

The 96th Academy Awards took place last night. Things unfolded "pretty much as expected", said Variety - but here’s a recap of the night.

Oppenheimer won big
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was the big winner of the night, claiming seven awards including Best Picture and Best Director. Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. both earned their first Oscars: Murphy won Best Actor, while  Downey Jr. took home Best Supporting Actor.

Women making history

Emma Stone scored her second Best Actress win for her role in Poor Things, which won a total of four Oscars. Stone joins an “elite club” of 14 other actresses who have won Best Actress multiple times, said Screenrant, having previously won for La La Land in 2017. 

Da'Vine Joy Randolph picked up Best Supporting Actress for The Holdovers, while Justine Triet secured Best Original Screenplay for Anatomy of a Fall alongside her writing partner Arthur Harari.

Big Kenergy
Two big Barbie performances stole the show. Ryan Gosling performed his nominated song "I’m Just Ken" in a diamond-studded pink suit and surrounded by 65 dancing Kens, said Elle. Meanwhile, Billie Eilish’s performance of “What Was I Made For”, which took home the Oscar for Best Original Song, got a standing ovation.

Al Pacino's slip-up and Anderson’s absence
83-year-old actor Al Pacino presented the top award of Best Picture - and he appeared to “jump the gun” in announcing the winner, said Sky News.

Wes Anderson also secured his first Oscar for his adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which clinched the title of best live-action short - although he wasn’t  there to pick up the award, noted the BBC.

Check out more of the Oscars best bits here.

🤳 TikTok in trouble

Instagram has overtaken TikTok as the world’s most downloaded app. 

How did we get here? 
While Instagram has remained incredibly popular since its launch in 2010, it has faced “stiff competition” from the Chinese-owned video platform TikTok in recent years, said The Guardian. But it seems that Instagram’s 2020 introduction of Reels - short-form videos that essentially mimic those found on TikTok - has helped the Meta-owned app to “stage a fightback”. 

Instagram was downloaded 767m times worldwide in 2023 compared with 733m for TikTok, according to stats released last week by market intelligence company Sensor Tower.

So are people turning off TikTok?
Not necessarily. As the Financial Times noted, TikTok “continues to gain better engagement”. Users spent an average of 95 minutes on the app in the fourth quarter of last year, compared with 62 minutes on Instagram.

But where TikTok certainly does face trouble is in the US, as lawmakers there step up efforts to clamp down on the Chinese-owned app. Critics have long argued that TikTok could be forced to share data on its US users with the Chinese government, or “spread misinformation beneficial to Beijing”, explained Associated Press - noting that TikTok denies it would do so.

So what could this clampdown look like?
The US House of Representatives is expected to vote this week on legislation that would give TikTok’s parent company ByteDance around six months to divest (essentially sell off) the app, or else face a “nationwide ban” in the US.

💰 Subscription PSA: The amount spent on accidental subscriptions that are “easy to get into but hard to cancel” has reportedly doubled in a year in the UK. This is your reminder to check what you have!

🪧 A Mother’s Day message: A group of mothers yesterday began a five-day hunger strike outside parliament to draw attention to how parents are “skipping meals to feed their children”. 

⌨️ Googling symptoms: Online search data may help spot ovarian cancer cases “up to a year before GP referrals”, a new study has found. 

📸 Photo pulled: The first picture of the Princess of Wales to be released since her surgery in January has been pulled by four major photo agencies over concerns it has been “manipulated”.

🐶 Top dog: An Australian shepherd named Viking beat more than 20,000 other dogs to be crowned best in show at Crufts 2024 on Sunday. Meet the winner here.

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Trivia answer: B) Four people were arrested in Spain on suspicion of selling fake Banksy artworks - here’s what police found in their workshop. 

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