Numlock News: March 6, 2024 • Fresco, Luciferase, Bees

Mar 06, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Bag Check

Delta Airlines has hiked the price of a passenger’s first checked bag by 17 percent, increasing the price from $30 to $35 per bag. That makes Delta the third American carrier to do so in a rather short period of time, following moves by American Airlines and United Airlines just three days apart in February, which in turn followed Alaska and JetBlue hiking their prices for checked bags slightly earlier. This is referred to by analysts as “herd instinct,” and by people who are not idiots with nothing but rocks rattling around in their skulls as “the obvious outcomes of industrial consolidation and a tightly-knit oligopoly that employs legions of consults to put a fig leaf over what would obviously be collusion if it weren’t outsourced to so-called market analysts.” In 2022, U.S. airlines made $6.8 billion in checked bag fees, and there is nothing you can do about it.

The Associated Press

Rivera

The San Francisco Art Institute declared bankruptcy last April with $20 million in debt, and a big remaining question pertained to the fate of the campus. The main concern was the odd detail that the bankrupt school nevertheless was the site of The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (1931), a mural painted by Diego Rivera that had been valued at $50 million. This put the institution in a bit of a bind, as it would be incredibly difficult to separate the real estate and the art as it underwent financial restructuring. A savior has swept in, though, in the form of a nonprofit staked by Laurene Powell Jobs, the philanthropist widow of the Apple co-founder, which will buy the campus and the mural for about $30 million.

Torey Akers, The Art Newspaper

Clark

Caitlin Clark broke the NCAA record for Division I basketball scoring on Sunday with a 35-point performance that became the single most-watched regular season women’s basketball game in 25 years. She’ll enter the postseason with 3,685 career points, beating the NCAA record of 3,667 points set by “Pistol” Pete Maravich, the NCAA women’s record of 3,527 points set by Kelsey Plum, and even beating the 3,649 points set by Lynette Woodard in the pre-NCAA era of the AIWA, back when the NCAA refused to acknowledge or support women’s athletics in any remote way and in fact ruthlessly litigated against Title IX. All told, the performance averaged 3.39 million viewers.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

SAT

The SAT is going fully digital amid excellent reviews for the new version of the test that renders the Dixon Ticonderoga #2 pencil utterly vestigial in our society. In the past year, the digital test has been trialed for international students, and over 220,000 students have taken the SAT exam in the digital format. Reviews have been good: 84 percent of students preferred the digital exam to the pencil and paper version, and given that standardized test practitioners have never really cared about how students feel about the test, most importantly 99 percent of staff said they preferred the digital to the analog SAT. This has been a bit of a forced innovation, as the standardized testing world was sent reeling by not just the pandemic but an ensuing movement by colleges to make the exams optional. In light of the new alternatives — which include simply not taking the exam — test designers have tweaked the test to make it 45 minutes shorter, more direct, and with instant results.

Nadra Nittle, The 19th

Light

A team of researchers sought to figure out what precisely happened evolutionarily to produce the firefly, the flying beetle that has evolved the literal opposite of the camouflage its contemporaries rely on to evade predators. They analyzed the genome of an aquatic firefly, and after managing to complete 98 percent of the genome, identified several homeobox genes that influenced the formation of light organs. Disabling two of them meant that the light-producing organ never formed, while disabling three others meant the flashes of light could not be coordinated. One gene was responsible for producing the luciferase enzyme that lights up and also possesses one of the most rad names in science.

John Timmer, Ars Technica

Conch

The conch is an iconic mollusk of the Florida Keys, and it’s in trouble. Before 2017, there were an estimated 700,000 adult queen conchs across the island chain. Hurricane Irma was a disaster for them, as superstorms can bury them alive under sand, and measurements showed that the population halved following the storm. Hurricane Ian was another blow, and as of 2022 there were estimated to be just 126,000 adult conchs in the Florida Keys. Many of the conchs are incapable of reproducing, a developmental issue among conchs that dwell in shallow waters that has been attributed to extreme temperatures. To try to get the population up, a team is attempting to relocate shallow water conchs to deeper water where they stand a better chance of mating and reviving the population.

Benji Jones, Vox

Bees

A new survey of studies of wild bee colonies estimated that there are between 200 million and 300 million wild honeybee colonies worldwide, making the number of hives in the wild on the order of two to three times as high as the 100 million managed hives of western honeybee colonies. The managed bees are critical to agriculture, doing as much crop pollination as all other bees combined and producing 1.8 billion kilograms of honey annually, really putting an edge to the concept of the “worker bee.” The estimate is that there are 350 million colonies worldwide, and given an estimated 10,000 bees per colony, something like 3.5 trillion individual honey bees on the planet, making them outnumber us 440 to 1.

Francis Ratnieks and Oliver Visick, The Conversation

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