Numlock News: December 18, 2024 • Planet Nine, Brogue, Warhammer

Dec 18, 2024

Warhammer

The company Games Workshop will soon join the esteemed ranks of the FTSE 100 index on the back of one of Britain’s most consequential cultural exports: the Warhammer series of tabletop war-gaming. Games Workshop is a £4.6 billion company, three times the size of Aston Martin, and in 2024 grew to $494.7 million in revenue. They manage to have a profit margin at 66.5 percent, which is jaw-droppingly high, with a key broker estimating that about 75 percent of their sales were in miniatures and 9 percent in paints, with the balance in books, digital apps, accessories and royalties.

Louis Ashworth, Financial Times

Graphite

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are looking into two promising new methods to convert carbon into carbon, which, take my word for it, is much harder than it sounds. The goal is to transform coal, which the U.S. has a whole lot of but is less and less needed for energy consumption, into graphite, which is scarce in the U.S. and desperately needed to produce large numbers of batteries. While lithium and cobalt get a lot of the attention in terms of necessary minerals to make batteries, by weight, most of an EV battery is graphite, and the higher quality graphite you have, the better battery you’ve got. The new processes explored at Oak Ridge include an electrochemical approach that can make graphite from coal byproducts at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, well under the 4,000 degrees needed to make conventional synthetic graphite and with way less waste. The economic analysis around that strategy found that it would end up costing 13 percent less than the Acheson process, too, when scaled up to 10,000 tonnes per year.

Mining.com

Know Thy Enemy

A new study published in Insects sought to find out when and how bedbugs developed resistances to the insecticides that had otherwise wiped them out by the 1960s, as they’ve returned with force over the past two decades. The researchers compared the genomes of wild bedbugs collected 68 years ago near Nagasaki with resistant bedbugs collected from a Japanese hotel in 2010. The newer bedbugs possessed a 19,859-fold stronger resistance to pyrethroids, which are the primary insecticides used for bedbugs. Upon synthesizing the genomes of the little monstrosities, they found 729 mutated transcripts in protein-coding genes that were linked to insecticide resistance.

Hiroshima University

Speed of Thought

According to a new study published in Neuron, human beings think at a rate of about 10 bits per seconds, vastly less than the 1 billion bits per second taken in by human sensory systems. Human cognition has generally been understood to be at somewhere between 5 bits per second to 20 bits per second, and the amount of information that a person might learn in their lifetime could fit on a thumb drive, which honestly is probably a more interesting statement about the achievement of the thumb drive than it is a slight to the accomplishments of the human intellect that managed to produce it.

Rachel Nuwer, Scientific American

Brogue

A new study found that residents of Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin and northeast England are much better at discerning and detecting a fake regional accent than a Londoner is. Among the 1,709 participants, when listening to such sentences recorded by native and non-native speakers, people from the northern U.K. could identify the truth of an accent 65 percent to 85 percent of the time, while residents of London, Bristol and Essex managed it just 50 percent to 75 percent of the time. In Belfast, that was 68 percent to 83 percent of the time, in Dublin it was 62 percent to 80 percent, and in Glasgow it was 66 percent to 85 percent of the time. This level of aplomb is hardly unexpected; after all, the British may have invented English, but the Irish perfected it.

Eric Niiler, The Wall Street Journal

Planet Nine

There are lots of objects in the outer solar system that have downright peculiar orbits, elongated and elliptical and the kind of shape you’d expect if there were some sort of larger gravitational force acting on them. These are objects like the dwarf planet Sedna, which orbits the sun every 12,599 Earth years. The sheer number of these weird little guys leads some to argue that there’s an undiscovered planet with a mass around five to 10 times that of Earth that orbits the sun up to 700 astronomical units away on a 20-degree ecliptic plane. The fun news is, if it does exist, we stand a pretty solid chance of finding it over the next two years, as the U.S.-funded Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile opens up in 2025 and is poised to increase the number of Kuiper belt objects now known from 4,000 to 40,000.

Robin George Andrews, Scientific American

Two Percent For Looking In The Mirror Twice

Just as the administration is starting to switch off the lights and get ready for the new guy, the FTC has approved a 4-1 final vote for the Junk Fees Rule, which will require hotels, airlines and concert venues to disclose and eliminate those devious and frustrating “convenience fees” that beguile consumers on the payment page. The agency estimates that the rule will save consumers up to 53 million hours per year in the aggregate, and equate to $11 billion in savings over the next decade. The rule won’t go into effect for 120 days after being added to the Federal Register, and could still be invalidated by Congress under the Congressional Review Act if they want to go that way.

Rashaad Jorden, Skift and Steven J. Horowitz, Variety

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