Numlock News: June 13, 2024 • Honeycreepers, Mycelium, Panama Canal

Jun 13, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Family Offices

An ocean of money is managed through elusive family offices, which are essentially in-house investment groups operated to the benefit of large, intergenerational family fortunes. In 2019, one research group estimated that there were 7,300 family offices managing $5.9 trillion globally in assets, so they’re really significant players, and their representatives are fixtures on the investment scene. They can be secretive, and actually gauging the weight of a given office is nigh impossible given the privacy offered by the arrangement. Because it takes at least $1.5 million per year to run one, generally you don’t see family offices when the capital is south of $100 million, at which point it’s just cheaper to hire a banker, but new tax break laws in places like Singapore are making it viable to operate a family office for wealth as low as $20 million. Now, none of that really is the juicy part, but just background for the latest trend: people claiming to represent family offices that don’t actually exist. A huge increase in family offices in the region — from 200 to 1,400 — muddies the waters of who is legit and who’s pulling off a rather old hustle, pretending to be a liaison for an aristocrat that doesn’t in fact exist.

David Ramli, Lulu Yilun Chen and Claire Ballentine, Bloomberg

Honeycreepers

The number of species of Hawaiian honeycreepers has fallen steeply, once over 50 unique species and now down to just 17 species, with some poised to go extinct in the wild this year. The birds are dying off because of avian malaria, which is transmitted by mosquitos and wreaking havoc on the populations that still lack an immunity, with just small pockets of birds in high elevations enduring. In a desperate attempt to save the birds, a coalition is mounting an eradication campaign, dumping thousands of modified, infertile male mosquitos on the islands in an attempt to stymie the mosquito population. The strategy is typically employed to keep tropical disease-spreading insects south of regions like Panama, but this is the first time it’s being utilized for the conservation of an animal.

Lauren Sommer and Ryan Kellman, NPR

Names

An old way that people used to try to grant an advantage to their descendants would be to contribute to a scholarship fund where people had to have a given last name in order to benefit. See, you can’t claim a charitable deduction on the scholarship donation if it’s only to the benefit of your own lineage, but by claiming that the scholarship can only benefit anyone with your last name, provided it’s unique enough, well that can pay for school for a sufficiently crafty applicant with a lucky surname. For instance, the University of Maine has 38 scholarships with a preference for descendants of given families, though they can benefit others if they go unclaimed for long enough. Scarpinatos can go to Texas A&M for mostly free, Zolps can go to Loyola in Chicago with some help, and NC State has a scholarship to cover Gatlins.

Melissa Korn, The Wall Street Journal

Don’t Tread on Me

A research laboratory wanted to find out how to cut down on stings from rays, and found that the stingray’s decision on whether or not to sting an errant foot came down to where exactly the foot was stepping. Step on a stingray’s side? They’ll swim away. Step on their snout? They don’t care, man. Step on their body, where the organs are? That’s a stinging, 85 percent of the time. Stingray stings are a real pain, but don’t get the press that bites from sharks do, despite there being tens of thousands of stingray stings in the world and just 57 shark attacks in 2022.

Katharine Gammon, Hakai Magazine

Mycelium

The Better Meat Co. is a supplier of non-meat proteins to consumer packaged goods brands and restaurants, and the company’s R&D wing has announced advances that will reduce the feedstock costs of producing its mycelium protein by 30 percent, as well as increase the quality of the protein production. The exciting thing about this is that it now makes its Rhiza product cost competitive with beef, the company said. The product has no saturated fat or cholesterol, and has more protein than eggs. The company’s current business has secured letters of intent with companies that have a total demand for 33 tons of dry mycoprotein per month, which translates to 99 meat-equivalent tons per month after rehydration.

Elizabeth Flood, Food Dive

Canal

It’s the rainy season in Panama, and the Panama Canal Authority has announced their plans for the increase in daily transits through the locks of the waterway. Right now, 32 ships can traverse the canal daily, a limit that will rise to 33 transits on July 11 and then 34 ships on July 22. That’s a massive improvement from the recent low of just 24 transits per day, and brings the canal closer to the original design of 36 daily transits. The canal was forced to drastically scale back the number of transits because of drought-induced remarkably low water levels in Gatun Lake, which loses fresh water with each transit.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Malaria

A new study published in Nature traces the ancient history of malaria, which sickens 250 million people per year. Before its method of transmission was understood, it was rampant in Europe and North America, and the oldest direct evidence of the parasite dated only to 1944. The new study pushes that back thousands of years, looking at DNA evidence in samples of ancient human genomes. Strains of the (less lethal) Plasmodium vivax was found among the remains of humans across 5,000 kilometers from Spain to Russia from the Stone Age until the 1700s. The tropical variant, Plasmodium falciparum, was found in the remains of a Nepalese man who lived 2,800 years ago, 2,800 meters above sea level. It also settles when malaria made it to the New World and whether it arrived with the first humans on the continent 15,000 years ago, on voyages by Polynesian seafarers, or on the Spanish ships in 1492; given that no sign of malaria was found in the Americas prior to 1500, it’s certainly looking like the last one.

Andrew Curry, Science

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