Numlock News: July 24, 2024 • Cheese, New Car Smell, Xiaohongshu

Jul 24, 2024

Dairy

Dairy sales have hit $76 billion, with sales of butter, cheese and yogurt items growing 15.4 percent over the past three years to hit $10.1 billion. Cheese and yogurt consumption have been particularly popular: Overall, consumption of cheese is up 46 percent over the past 20 years, and yogurt sales are up 142 percent over the past 25 years. In general, the dairy aisle is a way bigger deal than it once was, and one major part of that is that the trend of people wanting simpler ingredients in their food is a pretty easy lift for a type of food that is either “milk” or “something biochemically troubling but nevertheless tasty that has happened to milk.”

Chris Casey, Food Dive

Golf Lobby

The upstart league LIV Golf shelled out $140,000 per quarter every quarter of last year on lobbying the United States House and Senate in its quest to carve out a slice of the PGA’s business and immerse its Saudi backers into American sports. A surprise deal between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf got Congress worried that an American sports institution was being captured by an overseas power, prompting an investigation from Congress. It’s been over a year since the framework agreement was laid out, but it’s yet to come together in the formal alliance they planned. Making the whole matter more interesting is that LIV Golf has slashed its lobbying expenditures to just $90,000, in no small part because congressional attention has moved from LIV to their bosses, the Saudi Public Investment Fund, so it’s now their dime being spent on Congress.

Daniel Libit, Sportico

Xiaohongshu

The Chinese social app Xiaohongshu has over 300 million users, half of whom were born in 1995 or later and 70 percent of them women. While photo sharing is a big component of the app, it’s also a crucial platform for decision-making and information sharing that occupies a unique societal place. Other apps from China have international versions to bridge the digital wall separating China and the rest of the world, but Xiaohongshu has just the one app, with 90 percent of traffic from China. Valued at $17 billion, its main issue is that it’s got vastly lower revenue than its peers, but it’s growing faster. Downloads were up 16 percent year over year in the second quarter compared to 4 percent for Douyin, even though users spent 144 minutes per month on Douyin and 73 minutes per month on Xiaohongshu.

Cissy Zhou, Nikkei Asia

Pox

New research is looking into how it took decades or centuries for new diseases to spread to the Americas following the voyages of Christopher Columbus. The researchers modeled how disease might transmit aboard a ship, finding that viruses with very high rates of transmission actually were not able to reliably cross the Atlantic for some time while viruses that don’t transmit easily tended to peter out. It’s the viruses of intermediate transmissibility that made it across. For instance, given the 41 people who traveled 35 days on the Santa Maria, if one case of measles was on board at departure it would’ve had just a 24 percent chance of bringing it across.

Kai Kupferschmidt, Science

Umps

While many times bad referees and umpires can drive fans up a wall — exacerbated by massive technological leaps in the capabilities of robo-umps and video review — there are still some pretty good umpires out there. For instance, in 2022 Pat Hoberg called a perfect game, the first time since data started being kept in 2019, accurately calling all 129 pitches thrown over the course of Game 2 of the World Series. He’s one of the best, with his 2022 season scoring an accuracy rating of 95.5 percent, best in the league. One issue with skepticism of refs and umps at the pro level is that the desire to tear down an ump does trickle downward, and might increase the criticism of low-paid, often teenaged officials who oversee children’s sports and endure obnoxious degrees of abuse from over-involved families.

Devin Gordon, The Atlantic

New Car Smell

The phenomenon of “new car smell” is the result of volatile organic compounds being released by the carpets, upholstery and interior of a newly manufactured vehicle. A new study found that on especially hot days, though, the VOCs that make up new car smell can hit concerning levels within a vehicle, and on days when the temperature was between 25.3 C to 46.1 C (or, from 77.5 F to 115 F), the levels of formaldehyde, acetaldehyde and hexaldehyde got very high. In China, where the experiment was carried out, the national limit for formaldehyde in passenger vehicle cabins is 100 μg/m³, but it would sometimes exceed 200 μg/m³ during the experiment.

PNAS Nexus

Salmon

Farm-raised salmon have a problem where the high concentrations of the fish mean that pests and parasites like sea lice can spread quickly through a farm. Sea lice outbreaks can threaten production, and there are a number of solutions at varying degrees of technological sophistication to address them. One is to just add lumpfish to the salmon pens, as they’re voracious feeders of sea lice. The issue is, they also like the pellets used to feed the salmon, so now some researchers are trying to selectively breed lumpfish that are particularly insatiable hunters of lice, basically making sheepdogs of the sea. On the other end of the tech spectrum is underwater lasers that identify the shapes of sea lice and shoot them at a rate of three to five lice per second. A $45,000 underwater laser at one farm in the Arctic Circle fires 150,000 to 200,000 shots per day.

Jon Emont, The Wall Street Journal

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