Numlock News: March 28, 2024 • Orcas, Visas, Dragons
By Walt Hickey
Visas
As part of the budget signed into law on Saturday, $50 million has been allocated to the State Department to cut down on the passport backlog and reduce the long wait times for visas, a move that the travel industry lobbied heavily for. A first-time visitor visa can take 400 days to obtain on average in some markets, and wait times in Brazil, Mexico, India and Colombia have been especially onerous to obtain. According to U.S. Travel, the delays cost the country $12 billion in travel spending last year.
Baltimore
The implications of the devastating collapse of the 1.6-mile Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore are coming more clearly into view following the fatal incident where a container ship crashed into the bridge after losing power. While Baltimore handled just 3 percent of the East Coast and Gulf Coast imports, the port is crucial to cars and light trucks, and to the coal industry. It’s the second-largest terminal for U.S. coal exports, handling 2.5 million tons of outbound coal, and it’s an important export port for Ford and GM as well as a major import port for Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and BMW. About a dozen vessels remain trapped inside the harbor.
Nacha Cattan, Heather Perlberg and Brendan Murray, Bloomberg
Here There Be Dragons, Previously
Australia is home to the grassland earless dragon, a small species of lizard that has seen a sharp and extremely concerning decline. In 2019, there were hundreds of them in the wild per a survey, but this year only 11 were found. There are four species of earless dragon in Australia, and three of them are critically endangered while the fourth are just endangered. Their decline in the wild has sent researchers scrambling to facilitate a captive breeding program, in this case facilitated by a strategic matchmaking program that attempts to keep genetic diversity as high as possible. In Australia, only 0.5 percent of the grasslands that were present at the time of European colonization still exist.
Laura Chung, Agence France-Presse
Sewer
A £5 billion sewer known as the Thames Tideway Tunnel has been completed, a 16-mile-long pipe that will divert 34 sewage outflows that previously discharged into the Thames away from the notoriously polluted river. This will allow the London system to retain raw sewage when it rains, when ordinarily it would make its way into the river at anything more robust than a light drizzle. The tunnel is 23 feet wide, and has a capacity of 600 Olympic-sized swimming pools of, uh, liquid. John Snow for one would be proud that London has finally taken sewage and its water seriously.
Religion
A new survey of 5,600 adults sought to look into religious churn and the manner in which people exit, switch or take up a faith. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, 26 percent of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated, up 5 percentage points from 2013. All told, 18 percent of Americans have left a religious tradition to become religiously unaffiliated. Of those unaffiliated who have left a tradition, 35 percent were previously Catholic, 35 percent were previously mainline Protestant, 16 percent were formerly evangelical Protestant and 8 percent were from a faith that doesn’t fall in those categories. The reasons cited for departing a faith have changed somewhat since the question was explored in 2016. While the percentages that said they simply stopped believing in a religion’s teachings increased somewhat (from 60 percent in 2016 to 67 percent in 2023), there were large jumps in the percentage who left citing negative religious teaching about the treatment of gay and lesbian people (up from 29 percent in 2016 to 47 percent in 2023) as well as those who cited clergy sex abuse scandals (up from 19 percent in 2016 to 31 percent in 2023).
Public Religion Research Institute
Steel
Two steps are necessary to make steel, with the first being the transformation of iron ore into iron, then the second being the transformation of iron into different kinds of steel by mixing it with other metals. Most of the carbon dioxide emissions — 90 percent of them — come from that first step, so it’s encouraging that a number of companies that want to make emissions-free iron without having to melt ore have produced signs of progress. One strategy to make emissions-free steel is to bury the CO2 underground, but that’s failed to take off, and no new construction is ongoing at large steel plants. Another is to use a carbon-free fuel in lieu of coal, like hydrogen, which is attempted at H2 Green Steel. The last is to use electricity to convert the iron ore into iron, a promising strategy employed by Electra, which has begun to scale up from a successful prototype and is aiming to have a 50,000-ton plan built by 2027 and a million-ton scale by 2029.
Orcas
A new study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science argues that the killer whale, or Orcinus orca, should in fact be split from one species into three separate species: residents, transients and all the other kinds of orca. Resident killer whales have a more rounded dorsal fin than transients, a more open saddle patch with pigmentation, and subsist on fish, while the transient killer whales eat marine mammals like seals, porpoises and sea lions. The resident whales are very vocal, have discernible dialects, and live in a defined area in stable groups led by the eldest female. The transient whales have lots of odd calls but tend to be quieter, live in more ad-hoc groups, and roam wide. The thought is that as the ice ages separated groups, they specialized based on different geography.
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Thanks for the John Snow reference! He would be so pleased to know how many of us immediately think of him when we see the words “London” and “sewage.”
I am willing to bet that the destruction of that bridge in Baltimore will result in higher prices for, well, just about everything, as businesses take advantage of the situation to gouge us even if they were not affected at all by what happened.