Numlock News: July 26, 2024 • Pallets, Chevaya Falls, Crown-of-Thorns Starfish

Jul 26, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Pallet Town

Brambles is the largest producer of wooden pallets in the world, and has a unique problem where sometimes their customers don’t realize they’re just renting the pallets and use them for themselves. This can be a small problem — someone making a table out of a pallet that could still have some use — or a big one, like when the pallets get stolen and used by cartels to ship illicit wares. An individual pallet costs about $20, but there are so many of them that the industry producing and tracking them is worth multiple billions of dollars, and replacing them can cost millions in the aggregate. To address the issue, Brambles has an in-house crew composed of former law enforcement to run down the lost pallets, and it’s screwed 450,000 GPS trackers onto the pallets leased by its CHEP business at the tune of $60 a pop to rein in theft.

Stuart Condie, The Wall Street Journal

Mirror Magnified

The Department of Energy will invest $33 million into nine mirror-magnified solar energy projects, which usually take the form of vast fields of mirrors and lenses focusing light onto a single point in order to concentrate solar thermal power. Early attempts to make it work commercially have run into issues of higher-than-sustainable costs and lower-than-hoped output, but the research behind the energy production strategy is nevertheless promising. Originally designed to produce electricity, the technology is now seen as more ideal for producing heat or steam needed for industrial processes, or for long-duration energy storage.

James Temple, MIT Technology Review

Alphabet

High interest rates have had perks for the largest companies out there, and Google owner Alphabet is one of them. In the second quarter of the year, Alphabet made $1.023 billion simply in net interest income alone, money made just by virtue of having a large pile of money laying around in interest-bearing accounts. This is absurd for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that the money they made just from interest is more than the actual profits of 397 companies in the S&P 500, period — more than Target, or Starbucks, or Marriott, or Blackstone made in profit. Indeed, combine the bottom 30 earners in the S&P 500, and collectively they still made less profit than Google made just from interest on its hoard.

Luke Kawa, Sherwood

Starmie Used Bite, It’s Super Effective

The crown-of-thorns starfish eats the live polyps of hard corals, which in a healthy reef ecosystem isn’t too much of an issue but in a stressed coral reef can be a devastating problem. A 2012 study estimated that the half-meter-wide starfish were responsible for about 40 percent of coral mortality. There have been four 10- to 15-year outbreaks of the starfish in the Great Barrier Reef, and given that ecosystem’s struggles amid warming oceans, authorities needed to get inventive. So, they started culling the starfish across hundreds of reefs, a controversial action that has, in the years since, borne out to be effective. If current control measures continue, the Great Barrier Reef could gain 150 square kilometers of live coral by 2035.

Sofia Quaglia, Science

Cool Rocks

On July 21, the Perseverance rover ran over a cool rock that the team behind the rover has termed Chevaya Falls, scanning it with sophisticated on-board instrumentation and taking samples. The rock in question — 3.2 feet by 2 feet in size— is on an ancient riverbed and has colorful spots that contain iron and phosphate. Those spots indicate that at some point in the past, several specific chemical reactions happened. What makes this especially neat is that on Earth, those chemical reactions can be utilized by microbial life to derive energy. Far from a smoking gun, it’s more like the ancient residue from gun smoke (and plenty of other similar smokes) has now been found on a cool rock on Mars. The most immediate implication, though, likely has to do with the proposed Mars Sample Return mission, which was most recently priced at $11 billion and would bring those samples to Earth for analysis. Now that there’s a rock this promising, the sell might just get a little easier.

Eric Berger, Ars Technica and Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Cry It Out

New parents have to deal with an onslaught of information, often involving fundamental questions like, “Is it okay to sleep train kids and let them cry it out?” The information available to parents can be complicated, and often presents differing notions beyond the scientific consensus. Among nine literature reviews of pediatric sleep studies, eight of them advocated for sleep training, one took no position, and none were against. Among 75 clinical trials across those literature reviews with over 30,000 babies participating from 1980 to 2022, not a single one of them indicated that sleep training caused harm. But online, that consensus is nonexistent: A Reddit thread might be deeply polarized, books (nonexpert and expert) might present a thorough debate, and of the 20 most popular sleep-training profiles on Instagram, 12 oppose it and just five endorse it.

Tom Vaillant, The Pudding

Workaholic

“Workaholism” is intriguing to psychologists and researchers, and new occupational health research is attempting to hammer down a proper definition. The focus is to move it beyond people who simply put in long hours because they just really like their jobs, a factor that might have some negative effects on other elements of their lives but is a choice freely made. No, the interest is in people for whom there is a compulsion to put in long hours, who have persistent thoughts about work and have negative feelings when not working, factors that point to something closer to behavioral addictions than a mere love of the game. A recent study estimated that 15 percent of workers might qualify as workaholics under this definition.

Chris Woolston, Knowable Magazine

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Jacob Feldman, who wrote “Physical tickets are making a comeback — at a price” for Sportico. The different ways that merch has really become the be-all and end-all of so much of sports, entertainment, and pop culture is a deeply fascinating thing to me, and this phenomenon — where a company is filling the need for a physical memorial of an ephemeral event — was just super interesting to me. We spoke about how the digital revolution made sports worse, the rise of merchandising, and what makes a collectible valuable in the first place. Feldman can be found at Sportico and on X.

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