Fair warning, while the first item this week has no obvious connection to hacking, when 43 Rhesus monkeys escape from a lab, it’s just something that needs to be discussed. The tiny primates broke free from Alpha Genesis, a primate research facility in South Carolina. The monkey jailbreak seems to have occurred sometime on Wednesday, shortly after which the sheriff of Beaufort County was notified to be on the lookout for the tribe. Luckily, none of the animals has been used in any kind of infectious disease research, so this likely won’t be the origin story for anything apocalyptic. At least some of the animals were quickly located, doing their monkey thing in the woods and getting to swing from real trees for probably the first time in their lives. Alpha Genesis employees are trying to lure the monkeys back to captivity with food, but we suspect they’re too smart for that. They’ll probably come back on their own recognizance or when they get bored and realize that the real world isn’t all they thought it would be. When it’s all done we’d love to hear details about the breakout; was it something the monkeys got together and planned, or did one of the humans mess up?

With apologies in advance for the pun, there’s been a lot of buzz lately about tech billionaires falling over themselves to be the first to add “nuclear power mogul” to their CVs with reactor-powered AI data centers. In the early lead was Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, but it looks like he might have reached an unexpected hurdle in the form of a rare species of bee in residence near the site where he was planning to build the data center. The original article is aggressively paywalled and we haven’t been able to find out exactly what species of bee bested Zuck or what the specific concerns are, although we suspect that it’s disruption of habitat due to construction activities for the data center itself rather than anything related to the nuclear power aspect, since the deal was with an operator of an existing power plant. But fear not — Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are all waiting in the wings with their own nuclear ambitions, so carbon-free AI searches thanks to controlled nuclear fusion will surely soon be a thing.

Although the bees may have thwarted Zuck, not so the Seven Seas, as news leaks indicate that Meta is in the process of building a globe-spanning underseas fiber optic cable. The cable is said to go from coast to coast in the USA the long way, starting in South Carolina across the Atlantic to a landing in Portugal, down the coast of Africa and around the Cape, up to India before heading through to Australia and back across the Pacific to California. The cable is said to carry 16 pairs of fibers and could provide Meta with 320 Tbps of data capacity. That’s a lot of memes.

While you’ve probably never heard of Elwood Edwards, who passed away this week at the age of 74, you’ve certainly heard his voice. Mr. Edwards was the announcer who recorded the famous “You’ve got mail!” email alert for AOL, along with other audio blurbs for the once-ubiquitous ISP. He worked in broadcasting, both AM radio and television, and voiced commercials and announcements before being recommended for the email gig by his wife, who worked at the company that would eventually become AOL, Quantum Computer Services. He got $200 for the session, which he recorded on a cassette tape in his living room, and which would be heard 35 million times a day at AOL’s peak. Not too shabby.

And finally, as proof that we’re living in the weirdest possible timeline comes the story of The Baguette Bandits. It seems that a hacker group — the other kind — broke into French company Schneider Electric and stole 40 GB of data, issuing a $125,000 ransom demand payable in baguettes. The hackers apparently penetrated Schneider via the company’s Jira system and claimed to have specific data on internal projects and issues along with 400,000 lines of user data, which they threatened to release unless they got the baked goods. They did stipulate that they’d halve the ransom amount if Schneider would publically acknowledge the breach. We’re not sure if they want half the number of baguettes or if they want the same number of loaves all cut in half, but either way, it’s a lot of bread. More puns are possible, but we think we’ll leave them all on the table. Seems the yeast we can do.