Numlock News: July 12, 2024 • Stegosaurus, Europa, Crayfish

Jul 12, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Stegosaurus

On July 17, the fossilized skeletal remains of a 161-million-year-old stegosaurus will go up for auction at Sotheby’s during an event the company calls “Geek Week,” which, sure, sounds fun. The fossil was discovered in 2022 in Colorado, stands 11 feet tall and 27 feet long, and is expected to sell for an estimated $4 million to $6 million. However, given the size and quality of the specimen, the value is actually somewhat unclear as there hasn’t really been a skeleton on the market like this before.

The Associated Press

Consider the Crayfish

The crustacean crayfish can come in some pretty wild colors like blue, orange, red and purple, and for those familiar with natural selection and the general predisposition of creatures large and small to blend in with their environments, that’s kind of an odd outcome of eons of evolution. Researchers looked at data from 400 of the 700 known species of crayfish, and mapped where they appeared on the taxonomic tree and what they looked like. The brightly colored ones generally live in burrows underground, while the dull, camouflaged ones live underwater. So why on earth the splash of color? Best guess is that it evolved randomly and their burrowing lifestyle made it inconsequential for long-term reproductive odds anyway, given that the researchers estimated bright colors evolved independently 50 times over the past 260 million years.

Humberto Basilio, Science

Scam

A scam in which a scammer finds and then coerces or tricks a target into making payments into a fake crypto scheme is known as “pig butchering,” and they’re operated on an industrial scale, with some estimations putting the overall haul at $75 billion since 2020. Compounds containing people forced to work on pig-butchering scams have been found in Myanmar, the Philippines and Cambodia, but a big element of the infrastructure of pig butchering is how exactly they get the money from the victims. A new report from Elliptic identified a platform linked to the Cambodian ruling family, a deposit and escrow service called Huione Guarantee, as a key link and tool of the scammers, tracing $11 billion in total transactions over the past three years and $3.4 billion so far this year alone.

Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman, Wired

Mammoths

A particularly well-preserved 52,000-year-old female mammoth found freeze-dried in Siberia in 2018 was a key discovery on the way to a new announcement. Using a novel technique known as Hi-C, researchers have been able to take the animal’s woolly skin, extract DNA and reconstruct the 28 chromosomes of the mammoth in three dimensions, the entire genome of the extinct beastie. This is a pretty remarkable achievement, particularly given that it was only 25 years ago when we were first able to assemble a human genome.

Rob Stein, NPR

Sci-Fi

A fascinating new analysis of the top 200 science-fiction films of every decade from the 1950s to the present day has found a remarkable evolution in the medium over time. The stakes have always been the same: 73 percent of the movies of the 1950s presented an existential threat, compared to 76 percent of them in the 2010s. However, in the 1950s just 12 percent of those movies took place in the future, 11 percent in a post-apocalyptic world, and 77 percent of the time the protagonists figure it out in the end and improve the world. In the 2010s, 30 percent of those movies took place in the future, 43 percent of them were in a dystopian future, and now we get a happy ending 85 percent of the time. Lower lows, higher highs.

Alvin Chang, The Pudding

Greens

A new survey found that iceberg lettuce remains the most preferred leafy green by taste according to Americans, with 18 percent of respondents calling it their favorite. That’s followed by 15 percent for spinach, 13 percent for romaine, 10 percent for spring mix and 8 percent for mixed baby greens as well as cabbage. In terms of perceived nutrient content, the shadow of Popeye looms large over us all, with 33 percent saying they think spinach is the most nutritious and 17 percent going with kale.

Oana Dumitru, YouGov

Chips

NASA’s $5 billion spacecraft bound for Europa, a moon of Jupiter, has hit a setback as the space agency studies the durability of its radiation-hardened transistors. Currently scheduled for October, the spacecraft is bound for a Jovian radiation belt that can feature conditions 50 times as radioactive as those around Earth. The metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors, or MOSFETs, are manufactured by Infineon Technologies, a German semiconductor company, and have failed at lower radiation levels than those thought to exist around Europa. It already takes five years to reach Jupiter after launch in October, and delays depend on what’s necessary to replace any faulty chips, if the chips actually exist in enough numbers to service the spacecraft.

David W. Brown, The New York Times

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Eileen Guo, who wrote “The cost of building the perfect wave” for MIT Technology Review. Here's what I wrote about it. It’s a fascinating story about a key contradiction of the times, the desire for water-intensive activities in desert communities, and the ocean of money to be made in doing so, and the costs — not merely financial — in doing so. We spoke about the appeal of building an ocean in the middle of the desert, the environmental impact of wave pools, and how they interact with surfing culture. Guo can be found at MIT Technology Review and on X.

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