Numlock News: August 2, 2024 • Agar, Swans, Mollusks

Aug 02, 2024

Tramway

Zip Infrastructure is a Japanese infrastructure company that thinks it’s cracked a way to build tramways — essentially, cable cars that can move freely along a fixed cable and carry 12 passengers at a time at a speed of 36 kilometers per hour — at a fraction of the cost of rail. They’ve raised 700 million yen, and have cut a deal with the resort city of Baguio in the Philippines to build out a line. The cost of building the system was put at 1.5 billion yen ($10 million) per kilometer, which is about a fifth of the cost of building a monorail. Hey, just look at what tramways did for Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook; by gum, it put them on the map!

Shogo Kodama, Nikkei Asia

Swans

Every year, the United Kingdom embarks on a longstanding ecological research study of swan populations in the River Thames. Because this is Britain, it’s also incredibly silly, led by the King’s Swan Marker, featuring brightly-dressed rowers all working for a guy with a strange hat leading a medieval ceremony. While it’s ridiculous — we’re talking about a society that insists a particularly well-established landlord somehow owns all the swans because he’s a distant relation of William the Conquerer — it is nevertheless today a crucial gauge of the health of the habitat. Only 86 young swans were spotted over the five-day tally between London and Oxfordshire, down 45 percent over two years.

Sean Coughlan, BBC News

Agar

Agar is a gelatin-like, nutrient-rich substance that’s used to grow yeast and other things in Petri dishes, and it’s an integral component of lots of scientific experiments. It’s derived from seaweed, and a bad batch of unclear size has proven toxic to yeast, which has resulted in monthslong setbacks for some experiments in laboratories around the world that rely on Sunrise Science Products’ agar. The agar production chain is interesting — Sunrise makes it from two polysaccharides found in the cell walls of red algae, polysaccharides it buys from other suppliers like Global Bioingredients hundreds of kilograms at a time — and the origin of the issue is a mystery. Whatever is killing the yeast, it’s tough: If it’s present in agar, it’s already able to survive the autoclave sterilization process that heats it to 121 C for 20 minutes.

Molly Herring, Science

Scholar

Reese Richardson sought to prove fundamental issues in Google Scholar’s productivity ranking, and accomplished this with a colleague who managed to rack up a reputation score of 132 citations in just four years, an impressive statistic. It’s particularly impressive because that colleague is, in fact, a cat named Larry, as services that offer “citation and h-index boosting” make it possible for bad actors to help researchers appear more consequential. This beats a previous feline scholar, F.D.C. Willard, a cat belonging to theoretical physicist Jack Hetherington who started adding his cat — Felis Domesticus Chester Willard — as a coauthor in 1975 because he felt weird writing “we” in papers he alone wrote. F.D.C. Willard has 107 citations, a figure quickly surpassed by Larry.

Christie Wilcox, Science

Theft

The overall American shrink rate — the retail industry statistic describing inventory lost before sale as a percentage of total sales — has pretty steadily been 1.5 percent for years. However, major drugstore and retail chains have goaded each other into installing miles of plexiglass theft-prevention equipment that makes it time-consuming and frustrating for shoppers. That said, it turns out the real problem isn’t actually happening inside the stores from shoplifters; it’s happening on the road. According to CargoNet, tractor trailer and warehouse theft incidents were up 46 percent in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the same quarter of 2023, as thieves realized it’s far easier to boost a truckload of deodorant than it is to operate a fanciful, Fagin-esque intricate network of small-time thieves.

Amanda Mull, Bloomberg

Late

The Justice Department is suing railroad company Norfolk Southern, alleging that the company did not follow the law on the Amtrak route connecting New York to New Orleans. Norfolk Southern owns or controls 1,140 miles of the 1,377-mile route, but by law Amtrak has the right to preferential dispatching for passenger trains over commercial trains. The suit alleges that Norfolk Southern doesn’t do this, prioritizes its own trains over the ones with passengers on them, forces trainloads of people to pull aside to make way for its own loads, and causes system-wide delays. Last year, southbound trains arrived on schedule just 24 percent of the time, even after Amtrak added 90 minutes to the scheduled length in 2021 in an attempt to shore up something resembling accurate service.

Daniel C. Vock, Route Fifty

Mollusk

Researchers believe they have found the mother of all mollusks, a new species that existed 514 million years ago and was found in well-preserved fossils from Yunnan Province in southern China. It’s named Shishania aculeata, and resembles a flat, shell-less slug in spiny armor. The absence of the shell indicates that this was an early stage in mollusk evolution. Shell-less mollusks in particular — with soft bodies that don’t preserve well in the fossil record — are hard to study, so it takes some pretty remarkable fossils to find evidence of them.

University of Oxford

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