Numlock News: March 20, 2025 • OMNY, Fungi, Mantle

Mar 20, 2025

MetroCard

New York City’s MTA has announced that the final day of MetroCard sales for the subway and bus system will be December 31, after which the reloadable OMNY card will supplant the MetroCard as the primary way to pay for the subway. It’s the end of an era, a 32-year run that itself began by supplanting another iconic subway payment format, the token. According to the MTA CEO, 65 percent of riders have already shifted over to the tap-and-go system rather than the swipes, and the agency said it’ll save $20 million a year to discontinue MetroCard sales. You’ll still be able to use the physical MetroCards through 2026, at which point they’ll reach the end of the line, which I assume is in the Rockaways or something.

Sri Taylor, Bloomberg

Milestones

A new survey from the Pew Research Center found that on average, Americans said that the best age to get married is 26.5, the best age to have a kid is 27.3, the best age to buy a home is 28.8 and the best age to retire is 61.8. While not included in the survey, I can indeed confirm that the best age to delusionally answer a survey is “whenever these people took it,” the best age to have your first global recession is “probably not 19,” the best age to have your second global recession is “probably not 30” and the best age to buy a home is “probably a weekend during fight night at the Bellagio when the state of Nevada requires them to have enough funds in the vault to back up every chip on the casino floor, which is the only time that me and ten friends are gonna be able do what it takes to scrape together a down payment in this economy.”

Jordan Lippert and Janell Fetterolf, Pew Research Center

Fish

For the fifth year running, the Dutch city of Utrecht is operating a fish doorbell on a river lock that is live-streamed for an audience. Organizers will open the lock when a viewer notifies them of a fish waiting to get through. The fish spawn upstream and are interrupted by the lock, which used to be periodically opened to allow them through. However, that meant the migrating fish were susceptible to predators, and to clear the whole misunderstanding up cameras were installed and dutiful viewers could expedite their transit.

Aleksandar Furtula, The Associated Press

Mantle

The mantle transition zone is 410 to 670 kilometers below the Earth’s crust and is believed to contain a lot of water stored in minerals like ringwoodite and wadsleyite. While not very well understood, it’s generally held that water isn’t evenly distributed throughout the mantle transition zone. A new study published in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems notes that some areas of the mantle transition zone that are thought to be the wettest are also where we get weird volcanos — specifically, the ones that pop up in areas without two plates meeting one another, so-called “intraplate volcanism.” There’s a 42 percent to 68 percent correlation between intraplate volcanism and the wetter locations of the mantle, with a stronger correlation when the water has been there for 30 million to 100 million years.

Rebecca Owen, American Geophysical Union

Sports

Expensive travel leagues have supplanted simple extracurricular sports. Leagues are catering to the kids (and their parents) who want them to be among the 7 percent of teenage athletes who will advance to the collegiate level of their sport, bringing in some scholarship money. One effect is that the amount of money spent on youth sports has exploded, jumping from $10 billion in 2010 to an estimated $40 billion in 2024.

Mark Rerick, The Conversation

Motherlode

The China Geological Survey has confirmed a report first published in the Worker’s Daily in January regarding the discovery of what could be the largest rare earth deposit in the world. This deposit would advance China’s already robust lead in the rare-earth element space. The site is in Yunnan, which also contains large deposits of aluminum, zinc and tin. China already controls 60 percent of rare earth production and 85 percent of processing capacity. This deposit could contain 1.15 million tons of key elements such as praseodymium, neodymium, dysprosium and terbium, and could yield 470,000 tonnes of the materials.

Mining.com

Fungi

Antifungal drugs are hard to come by, as fungi tend to resemble healthy human cells a whole lot more than bacterial cells, making it hard to find a chemical that kills a fungus but not our own cells. This is what makes the discovery of an anti-fungal compound named mandimycin so exciting, particularly after a successful trial in mice infected with a drug-resistant strain of Candida albicans. The fungus killed all the untreated mice while mice treated with a four-day 10 mg per kg dose of mandimycin lived. The drug was also effective against Cryptococcus neoformans, which kills 100,000 people with HIV per year, and Candida auris, which became resistant to all drug classes a decade ago. While there’s a long road to go before human clinical trials, promising anti-fungal compounds are rare enough that it is exciting.

Kai Kupferschmidt, Science

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