Numlock News: December 13, 2024 • Firefly Sparkle, Dirigibles, Neanderthals

Dec 13, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Cheap Beef

The Kendrick Lamar-Drake beef was arguably the largest story in music of this year, breaking through to the mainstream of pop culture conversation and dominating social media and gossip as the artists went song-for-song unloading on one another. In perhaps a sign of the times, though, the songs made a pretty paltry amount of money despite that kind of airtime, just another indication that the streaming model really isn’t working for a lot of the musicians working in the industry. All told, Billboard put the amount generated by the six tracks at the heart of the battle at just $15.4 million in streaming, digital sales, and publishing revenue, with the top track — “Not Like Us” — contributing $7.63 million to that.

Elizabeth Dilts Marshall, Billboard

Firefly Sparkle

Scientists analyzing imagery from the James Webb Space Telescope have become intrigued by a galaxy they’ve called Firefly Sparkle, which we’re seeing as it looked when the universe was 600 million years old, at the very early days of the cosmos. Its light has taken 13 billion years to reach us, was possible only thanks to a coincidence of gravitational lensing, and was seen with a technically miraculous instrument, so of course we’ve decided to name Firefly Sparkle like it’s a My Little Pony. Either way, it’s really cool, and has 10 clumps of stars in vivid colors because they’re in different stages of formation.

Pallab Ghosh, BBC News

Blu-ray

LG, one of the last remaining holdouts, will no longer produce Blu-ray players, a sign that the physical media players may finally be falling out of style. The two most recent players it released — the UBK90 and the UBK80 — came out seven years ago and have been pulled from sale. Sony said it’s ending development of recordable Blu-rays, Best Buy stopped selling them this year, Disney is going to stop releasing Blu-rays in certain markets, Samsung stopped making players in 2019, and even the remaining players like Panasonic haven’t made a new Blu-ray player since 2019. Sales of Blu-rays peaked in 2017 at 884,000 units and have declined since. Now that the future is owning nothing and maintaining subscriptions to everything; we’ll see if this works out for us long-term.

Scharon Harding, Ars Technica

Application

It’s more annoying than ever to get into college, as the application process has become even more expensive, demands more from applicants, and happens as in public and on social media as possible. The number of students applying to college was up 21.3 percent from the 2019-20 year to the 2021-22 year, and students who do apply are sending out way more applications (6.22 in 2021-22, up from 4.63 in 2013-14) than before. Overall, 17 percent of students applied to 10 or more colleges in the most recent year of data, up from 8 percent a decade ago. All this means, mathematically, is more denials and fewer acceptances, which makes the whole process even more demoralizing.

Anna North, Vox

Color

A new study published in Biological Reviews argues that color vision emerged in animals roughly 500 million years ago. What’s interesting about that is that back then, as we understand it, the world was all rather drab, because the emergence of bright colors in seeds didn’t exist until 300 million years ago, vibrantly colorful flowering plants didn’t exist until 200 million years ago, and colorful vertebrates and arthropods didn’t actually emerge until 130 million years ago. This is a neat and slightly confusing conclusion: essentially, the ability to detect color existed well before the consistent presence of it.

Sara Novak, Scientific American

Airships

Blimps are back, baby, with the new trend of sustainable aviation and a number of companies entering the mix on rigid airships as forms of commercial shipping and luxury travel. For instance, the largest aircraft in the world, the zeppelin LTA Pathfinder 1, is currently being tested in California. With no need for a runway and decent speed — 100 to 130 kilometers per hour — there’s a number of ways these things could be useful, especially as come companies place a premium on low-carbon shipping. Ocean Sky Cruises is offering a two-day, $200,000 trip from Svalbard (best known as “the place on the Risk board you’ve never heard of but really have to hold”) to the North Pole in such an aircraft.

Laura Hall, BBC News

Neanderthals

Interbreeding between Neanderthals and early humans has been understood to have happened for many years, but two new studies published this week in Nature and Science offer new certainty on both the timeline of those liaisons as well as their millennia of duration. The Nature study found that humans mixed with Neanderthals from 49,000 to 45,000 years ago, while the Science study found a very similar timeline by way of different methods, putting it at 50,500 to 43,500 years ago. This is altogether pretty late in our evolution, and given that Neanderthals went extinct 40,000 years ago, happened somewhat close to the end of their run, too.

Aylin Woodward, The Wall Street Journal

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