Numlock News: February 21, 2024 • Quasar, Sailboat, Genomes

Feb 21, 2024

By Walt Hickey

DVDs

The era of buying physical DVDs and Blu-rays is coming to a close, as the business fell in 2023 to a $1.3 billion slice of the U.S. home entertainment spend, down from $9 billion in 2011. Even if it’s not completely over, it’s clear that this has become a niche market in entertainment. Physical movie rentals amounted to just $225 million last year, down from $5.7 billion in 2011, as subscription streaming eats the whole market alive. Overall, DVD purchases are down 92 percent off the 2006 peak. Even stalwarts of the DVD business are bailing: Disney, which invented the Disney Vault and has forgotten more about false scarcity than you or I will even know, announced yesterday it’s licensing its whole physical media business to Sony to handle.

Robert Steiner, VIP+ and Bill Hunt, The Digital Bits

Farms

According to the latest census data from the USDA, the United States lost 141,733 farms and 20.1 million agricultural acres from 2017 to 2022, a shellacking for the family farm in America. For the first time on record, the United States has fewer than 2 million farms. This continues a trend, as it also means that the United States has lost 304,305 farms since the 2007 Ag Census. Farms are getting bigger, as smaller family operations either get wiped out or gobbled up: The average farm size was 463 acres in 2022, up 22 acres on average compared to 2017. All told, only 26,214 farms accounted for half of all sales, while 586,286 farms (31 percent of them) reported sales less than $2,500.

Chris Clayton, Progressive Farmer

Influence

China has a multibillion-dollar livestreaming industry fueled by independent contractors attempting to sell, flirt and dance their way into riches. Facilitating this industry is a network of 24,000 talent agencies that find, develop and stake talented livestreamers for apps like Douyin, but it’s a brutal business. Livestreamers often go head-to-head in “PK battles” where they must earn more virtual gifts from fans than other livestreamers, an exhausting and at times demoralizing process for legions of performers. The market is flooded, which means that talent agencies with particularly cutthroat business models have been getting away with exploitative practices; in December alone, Chinese courts handed down no fewer than 23 judgements regarding livestreaming contract disputes. Overall, 95.2 percent of full-time livestreamers make less than 5,000 yuan ($702) a month.

Viola Zhou, Rest of World

All Of Us

The NIH has been attempting to recruit 1 million people of diverse backgrounds to contribute their DNA, blood samples and medical records to an ambitious project designed to build a genomic database that can fuel science for years to come. So far, they’ve recruited 526,000 people, of whom 47 percent are racial and ethnic minorities and 80 percent are from groups that are often left out of large-scale studies. Of the 245,388 whole genomes collected, 1 billion genetic variants have turned up, 275 million of which are new to science.

Jocelyn Kaiser, Science

Age of Sail 2

Chemship, a Netherlands-based shipping company, has launched the world’s first chemical tanker that has wind-assisted propulsion. The MT Chemical Challenger is a 134-meter vessel that will run between the U.S. East Coast and the Mediterranean, and has four 16-meter-high aluminum sails with a combined gross wind surface of 900 square meters. On average, this will cut emissions by 10 percent, and along with other measures implemented will bring about a fuel savings of over 15 percent.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Ascent

Ascent Pharmaceuticals produced 12 percent of the United States’ supply of generic Adderall in 2022, as well as significant amounts of Concerta, Ritalin and Vyvanse, but the factory has been shuttered even amid a devastating shortage of the drugs that has roiled the United States. Following the DEA’s failure to detect or intercede in the opioid epidemic that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the agency has been on a warpath cracking down on pharmaceutical producers who have even minor issues with their recordkeeping. As a result, Ascent has been shut down despite producing significant amounts of a drug that is in distressingly short supply nationwide as the DEA attempts to save face. It’s caused 600 million missing doses of ADHD meds per year.

James D. Walsh, New York Magazine

Quasar

The Very Large Telescope in Chile has detected what scientists described as the most luminous object ever detected, a quasar named J0529-4351 at the core of a galaxy. The black hole of the galaxy is 17 billion times the mass of our sun, and consumes the equivalent of our sun’s mass every day. A quasar is when a black hole is rapidly consuming mass that is accelerated and being torn apart, emitting an enormous amount of light in the process. This particular quasar — with an accretion disc seven light-years wide — is 500 trillion times as luminous as the sun.

Jonathan Amos, BBC

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