Numlock News: March 13, 2025 • Whales, Widdershins, Walt Disney World

Mar 13, 2025

Rides

A whole lot of Disney is closed right now, and anywhere from a fourth to a third of Walt Disney World Resort is expected to be shut down at some point this year for maintenance and renovations. There are currently 13 ride closures at Disney World, the highest level in a year and the second-highest level since 2010, excluding the pandemic. Part of this is a pipeline problem. No new rides debuted this year (part of it is deferred maintenance finally catching up with the mouse), but it comes at a bad time because rival resorts are beefing up their offerings and launching new parks. There’s also a key incentive behind the deferred maintenance: parks produce incredible amounts of money — $11.2 billion last year alone, up from $5.1 billion a decade before — and nobody wants to be the guy who messes with that. The Lightning Lane ride reservation system is also a $50 million business, making it a tough-to-squeeze-in maintenance when rides might be booked weeks in advance.

Chris Stokel-Walker, Sherwood News

The Dune Express

The longest conveyor belt in the United States has begun preliminary operation in the Permian Basin, a project intended to expedite the transport of millions of tons of sand to fracking wells. Moving the sand by truck is a long and (at times) dangerous prospect, which prompted the creation of the $400 million conveyor belt to avoid/alleviate traffic and to move the important sand 42 miles between Lea County, New Mexico and Kermit, Texas. It’s not the longest in the world (that distinction belongs to a 61-mile conveyor belt in Western Sahara moving phosphorous) but with a freight capacity of 13 tons, it’s been well received by the industry and its neighbors who no longer need to deal with sand truck congestion.

Julio Cortez and Nadia Lathan, The Associated Press

Widdershins Galaxies

A new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society analyzed the James Webb Space Telescope’s new image of the deep universe and found something a bit weird. It’s generally thought that galaxies rotate clockwise or counterclockwise at about equal rates. However, of the 263 galaxies captured in the image, 105 of them rotate counterclockwise while 158 rotate clockwise, based on our viewing perspective. That’s a pretty unlikely skew if the spin of early galaxies is actually random. While it could be just a random sample that incidentally had a bit of a skew (it happens!), there are other theories at play, namely one that the universe was born rotating starting at the Big Bang, making spinning in one direction slightly easier. It could also mean scientists might have to reconsider the effect of the Milky Way’s own rotational velocity — clockwise and otherwise considered to be a negligible factor when observing other galaxies — on their calculations.

Kansas State University

Tommy John

Baseball has seen a spike in arm injuries, with ulnar collateral ligament procedures — the so-called Tommy John surgery — up 170 percent across the major and minor leagues. The culprit is obviously the fastball. The average 4-seam fastball speed increased from 91.9 miles per hour in 2008 to 94.3 miles per hour in 2024, and the number of pitches over 100 miles per hour increased from 214 pitches in 2008 to more than 3,300 in 2024. That aggregated additional strain adds up, and it is flaying the ligaments of the best in the sport bit by bit.

Jared Diamond, The Wall Street Journal

EVs

All things considered, electric vehicle sales are doing pretty great, with global EV sales up 30 percent and sales in the United States up 28 percent year over year. Some of that is probably Americans looking to get into an EV while the subsidies are good — EV sales were up by 8 percent last year — but EV markets are doing great in the rest of the world too. Germany and the United Kingdom each pulled in 40 percent increases in sales and China logged a 35 percent increase in sales year-over-year-to-date.

Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica

WhaleSpotter

WhaleSpotter is a shoebox-sized device being tested on ships; it uses stabilized heat-sensing cameras to identify evidence of far away whales that may be in the water, and then alerting navigators and captains of the potential whales ahead. This allows them to take action to avoid hitting whales, which is a serious problem on the high seas for both whales and ships, killing thousands of whales per year. The system is on ferries, research vessels and cruise ships, and testing on large container ships has proven promising. Research trials in 2019 spotted 78 whales, and across two dozen installations operating last year, it made 51,000 marine mammal detections. In testing on container ships with long-range cameras, the tech can spot marine mammals up to 6 kilometers (about 4 miles) away.

Ashley Braun, bioGraphic

Avocado, Baby

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed over 1,725 fossilized avocados in Honduras to learn more about the history of the fruity. Avocados are believed to have their earliest appearance 400,000 years ago in Mexico and split into three species over the next several thousand years using seeds distributed by megafauna. After all those large animals went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, the number of avocado plants fell sharply. However, when humans emerged, things picked back up again, and the new study of 11,000 years of avocados found that humans began domesticating avocados sometime around 7,500 years ago.

Bob Yirka, Phys.org

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