Numlock News: May 2, 2024 • Konami, Flops, Meteorites

May 02, 2024

Run, EV, Run

Rental car behemoth Hertz announced it will sell an additional 10,000 of its electric vehicles from its existing fleet, on top of the initial intention to sell 20,000 electric models. It has been a complicated time at Hertz, as the high maintenance costs and depreciation of its EVs have resulted in a $392 million loss in the first quarter on revenues of $2.1 billion. The original plan was to buy 100,000 Tesla cars on the rental car industry’s rebound following the worst of the pandemic. Now, obviously, this is only the second-worst longstanding financial relationship Hertz Rental Car has found itself in.

Jay Ramey, Autoweek

Competition

This week Konami shattered its own record, with 7,443 people participating in the Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series Tokyo, beating the previous record of 4,364 entrants in a trading card game tournament, also set by Yu Gi Oh! in 2012. Events were potentially marred by allegations that a prominent player, no less the scion of a powerful corporation, elected to employ considerable resources as well as remarkable elements of magic to trap, indefinitely, the grandfather of a rival contender within a Yu-Gi-Oh card, setting up a complicated but nevertheless rewarding quest into inexplicably Egyptian mythology whereby the rival contender was sufficiently possessed by a ghost to contend with the scion.

Milton Griepp, ICv2

Flops

If you’re in the market, the federal government is trying to sell off a perfectly good supercomputer. With a peak performance of 5,340 teraflops, capable of doing 3 billion calculations per second for every watt of energy consumed, featuring 4,032 dual-socket nodes, with a total of 145,152 CPU cores, with 313 terabytes of memory and 40 petabytes of storage, this baby is on sale. Kit and caboodle, it runs on 1.7 megawatts of power. Yes, my sources confirm that it can sustain up to three open Chrome tabs.

Benj Edwards, Ars Technica

Satellite

The year is 1974, and the goal is space; a reconnaissance satellite, KH-9 Hexagon, ejects a 26-inch-wide satellite and pushes it out to a 500-mile orbit. This extremely expensive item is then immediately lost after its deployment fails, and it goes from being a remarkable piece of technology to space junk. Radars lost it in the 1970s, only to find it again in the 1990s, only to lose it yet again, and now after 25 years the S73-7 satellite has yet again been rediscovered.

Passant Rabie, Gizmodo

Vaulted

Vaulted Deep is a company funded by Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and McKinsey, and essentially exists to dump enormous volumes of human waste into the ground. Brands are paying Vaulted Deep $58.3 million to push waste downward into deep wells. As part of their deals, the company has agreed to dump 152,480 tons of carbon dioxide by 2027. Already, Vaulted Deep is taking 20 percent of Los Angeles’ sewage sludge and pushing it underground.

Justine Calma, The Verge

Meteorites

So far, hundreds of thousands of meteorites have been found in Antarctica, with scientists collecting some 80,000 of them to date. Antarctica is a pretty easy field to find meteorites, owing to the reality that a whole lot of things have hit there, and the accumulated extraterrestrial rock is a pretty critical mass to facilitate experimentation. The problem is, due to warming, meteorites are melting into the ice faster than ever. A new analysis found that three-quarters of Antarctica’s meteorites will be out of reach by 2100 given current levels of warming.

Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

Veins

The veins on leaves of trees are fascinating in their own right, and may have developed as a result of insects. About 340 million years ago, leaves began to have veins that branched a bunch. Then, 23 million years ago, more complex intersecting paths of veins in leaves developed. In between? Insects, voracious as they are, begin chowing down on leaves, leaving damage that could only be handled by the latter types of leaves.

Elizabeth Pennisi, Science

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