Numlock News: April 4, 2024 • Beetles, Termites, Bones

Apr 04, 2024

By Walt Hickey

South Carolina

An imbroglio in South Carolina follows the government’s discovery of $1.8 billion languishing in a bank account as legislators attempt to figure out precisely where the money actually came from and what it’s supposed to be doing. The state’s Senate Finance Committee has grilled the state’s accountant and treasurer about it, each blaming the other for the mishap. The account is a flow-through account, an intermediary between state funds and the investments in the stock market or bonds that states do as part of the course of doing business. Essentially, this money probably should have been invested rather than just accumulating in an account, and legislators are trying to figure out exactly what should happen.

Tina Terry, WSOC-TV

Bones

Despite centuries of war in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, one mystery has long beguiled archaeologists: Where are all the bones? For instance, despite over 10,000 people dying at Waterloo, only two bodies have been excavated at Waterloo since 2012, not to mention the scores of horses killed that day. A new book argues that it’s because of a massive market for bone char that emerged in the 1830s, as markets for sugar boomed and the industry needed burned bone as a raw material for its factories. Those bones became very valuable very quickly; the price for 100 kilograms of bones increased from two francs in 1832, the year before the first sugar factories opened in Belgium, to 14 francs per 100 kilograms in 1837, when the industry was in full swing. It didn’t take much for the farmers in the area to do the math.

Andrew Curry, Science

Elephants

Botswana is home to 130,000 elephants, and would prefer otherwise. The country has a massive elephant population and has been very keen to offload them to countries where their populations of elephants have been depleted, such as Angola, which was sent 8,000 elephants, as well as Mozambique, which has been offered hundreds. It’s a bit of a sore spot for Botswana, and leaders don’t tend to react well to European leaders calling for more conservation action and limits on hunting. Just this week, the president of Botswana has threatened to send 20,000 elephants to Germany following the country’s environmental minister proposing additional limits on trophy hunting.

Jacqueline Howard, BBC

TikTok

A new analysis from Pew Research Center found that only 52 percent of U.S. adult TikTok users have ever bothered to post a single video, and that the actual content on the app is from a seriously small group of individuals. Indeed, 98 percent of publicly available videos came from the top 25 percent of users. Most significantly, the percentage of TikTok users who get news from there increased from just 22 percent in 2020 to 43 percent in 2023. That said, 59 percent of U.S. adults see the app as “a major or minor threat to U.S. national security,” which is not exactly great.

Kirsten Eddy, Pew Research Center

Sulfuryl Fluoride

Particularly potent greenhouse gases have long been a serious concern, particularly long-lived ones that endure in the atmosphere for years. Following the passage of the Montreal Protocol, the insect-killing fumigant methyl bromide was phased out and largely replaced by the fumigant sulfuryl fluoride. However, a 2021 study found that concentrations of sulfuryl fluoride have been rising fast, despite scientific understanding that it had a short lifespan in the atmosphere. This turned out to be wrong, and sulfuryl fluoride actually lasts for 36 years, prompting a revision of the chemical’s benefits. The reality is, it’s termites; the U.S. is responsible for up to 17 percent of sulfuryl fluoride emissions, 60 percent to 80 percent of which are out of California, as 85 percent of the state’s sulfuryl fluoride is used to kill the western drywood termite.

Chelsea Harvey, E&E News

Bluey

The new juggernaut in kids entertainment is Bluey, a show that has come to dominate not only kids’ viewership but also the aesthetic appreciation of parents. Debuting in Australia in 2018, the show has swept the world, the second most streamed thing on all of Netflix last year behind Suits. Americans watched 731 million hours of Bluey in 2023, while China watched the third season 100 million times on iQIYI. Parents genuinely dig it, to the extent that episodes like “Sleepytime” can garner legit critical praise. Bluey books have sold 20 million copies, its two soundtracks have generated 350 million streams, the live show has hit 149 U.S. cities, and the Bluey brand has been pegged at $2 billion, damn close to the $4 billion value upon sale of Peppa Pig in 2019.

Devin Leonard, Bloomberg

Beetles

On the ledger of animal life, there are beetles, and then there is every other living animal on Earth. Of the 1 million named insects on the planet, 400,000 of them are beetles, with scientists describing about another 1,000 new species every year. Keep in mind, when it comes to “animals,” we’re talking like 1.5 million species. Beetles somewhat dominate the tree of life, and were I a particularly religious man I would probably find this fact terrifying. Needless to say, the downright abundance of beetles is an evolutionary enigma. The creatures are 350 million years old, and lots of the time that we deal with an ancient species — coelacanth, tuataras — we find few extant species, not vast numbers of them. One theory is that they’re just plain resilient, surviving multiple mass extinctions, and that their durability is the key to their shocking diversity.

Lesley Evans Ogden, Knowable Magazine

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