Numlock News: June 27, 2024 • GOES, Wool, Mayan

Jun 27, 2024

Wool

Prices for wool have dropped considerably, and it’s causing serious problems in Australia, which is responsible for 80 percent of the superfine wool fiber under 18.5 microns in diameter that goes into garments. Benchmark prices on the Australian Wool Exchange have slipped to AU$11 (US$7) per kilogram, well under the AU$20 notched in 2019. That’s prompting some affected farmers to consider getting out of the business altogether. Roughly 80 percent of Australia’s wool is exported to China, where it’s processed. Recent fast-fashion trends and a fickle consumer unwilling to pay for wool garments are two big factors, even though wool actually is pretty great when it comes to green trends: Manufacturing 100 wool sweaters used 18 percent less energy than the same sweaters out of polyester would, and used 70 percent less water than cotton.

Akane Okutsu, Nikkei Asia

Bd

Global frog populations have been decimated by Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a fungus that has pushed several species of frog to or past the threshold of extinction. It’s very hard to treat, but a new paper published in Nature offers a fascinating strategy that involves installing specialized shelters in targeted areas. While antifungal medication kills Bd in a lab, it’s hard to get out there in the wild, though heating it to 30 C kills it. The small, heated enclosures do just that, and frogs that go into them get warmed up and kill off the fungus in the process, faring far better than those kept at 19 C, which is the fungus’ most ideal temperature.

Erik Stokstad, Science

GOES-U

Tuesday saw the successful launch of the GOES-U satellite, and its subsequent successful deployment 22,236 miles (35,785 kilometers) above Earth within 4.5 hours of launch. The GOES satellites are a fascinating family of Earth-observing spacecraft, and this satellite is the fourth and final of NOAA’s newest series of weather satellites. Carried to space by the mighty Falcon Heavy, it was renamed to GOES-19 after being placed into geostationary orbit, and after a thorough check will replace its predecessor GOES-16, which was launched in November 2016, occupying the GOES East position sometime around April of next year. It’s got five science instruments and will monitor space weather, as well.

Meredith Garofalo, Space.com

Brain Waste

The 170 billion cells in the human brain produce waste over the course of the day, and the process by which those waste products are washed out has remained a compelling and important point of study, especially as researchers attempt to stymie scourges such as Alzheimer’s Disease. Two teams of scientists have published papers in Nature that offer a new, more detailed understanding of the brain’s waste removal system, presenting a process where electrical waves push fluid around cells deep in the brain out toward the surface during sleep, where an interface gets that junk into the blood and it can be ferried out to the normal waste processing systems of the body. They exposed mice that develop a form of Alzheimer’s to bursts of sound and light that occur 40 times per second to simulate this process, and found that doing so increased the flow of clean cerebrospinal fluid into the brain and amyloid-carrying waste out of it. Amyloid buildup is found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.

Jon Hamilton, NPR

YouTube

According to Nielsen’s monthly report on television usage, YouTube made up 9.7 percent of all viewership on connected and traditional television sets in the United States in May, and that’s among everything. Among streaming services alone, YouTube was responsible for 25 percent of all usage. Again, that’s not even counting mobile phones or laptops; YouTube has now come to take a solid slice of what had long been the domain of network and cable television on their own home turf.

Alex Sherman, CNBC

Lost City

Archaeologists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History report the discovery of an ancient Mayan settlement in the state of Campeche. It was identified with the remote scanning laser technology lidar, which bounces light off the ground and allows for the mass surveying of large regions of land, regardless of how accessible that land may be to archaeologists hiking in. Because the region is hard to cultivate, there were no obvious canals or terraces that would have drawn the eye of researchers. The settlements are believed to date to the Late and Terminal Classic periods, which went from the year 600 to the year 1000 of the common era. From 830 to 950, the Maya abandoned settlements in the lowlands and underwent significant cultural upheaval.

Torey Akers, The Art Newspaper

Helicopters

A new issue for America’s national parks is intense heat diminishing the ability to carry out rescue operations and air ambulances in some of the most remote places in the country. While millions will visit national parks, extreme heat will pose a serious threat, and statistically you’re going to have to respond to people who have health incidents in hard-to-reach places. In Death Valley, nominative determinism is taking hold and doing its thing: When temperatures go higher than 120 degrees Fahrenheit, as they historically have but now very often do, you simply can’t get an ambulance helicopter off the ground safely, as the air is too hot and too thin to get the desired lift. This means sending rescuers by ground, where they would face the very same conditions that made a person seriously ill in the first place.

Kylie Mohr, The Atlantic

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