By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
Toads
A new study sought to find out the deal with toads, and it delivers. Toads are now on all six continents, but emerged first in South America about 61 million years ago. Based on the study — which analyzed DNA from 124 species — the animal didn’t spread to the Old World through the previously believed land bridge that at one point connected modern Alaska to Russia. Instead, it crossed directly from South America to Africa, either by hitching a ride across the Atlantic on mats of vegetation or, more interestingly, migrating through Antarctica when it had a warmer climate and was connected to South America 30 million years ago. This last bit is not as crazy as “toads crossed Antarctica to make it from South America to Africa” sounds, as there were frog fossils discovered in Antarctica in 2020. The real neat bit is the evolutionary kick start to that migration: poison. There was a rapid rise in the number of new species 33.5 million years ago, which is incidentally exactly when they evolved the parotoid gland that secretes antipredator goo.
Kryptos
Kryptos is a famous work of art on the campus of the CIA headquarters in Virginia, consisting of four encrypted passages carved into steel as an invitation to attempt to decrypt it. While three of the four messages encoded in the copper have been solved, the fourth one remained uncracked. The sculptor has now announced plans to auction the text of the passage and other papers with an expected hammer price between $300,000 and $500,000. Well, a pair might have found an innovative solution: papers in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution, which isn’t exactly the manner in which the artist intended it to be solved. While this might cause the eventual sale price of the solution to fall substantially, I don’t know, man, it’s right there in the CIA motto: you know truth, and the truth shall make it free.
John Schwartz, The New York Times
Bury
One proposed solution to climate change is the relatively low-tech idea of wood vaulting: cutting down trees and then burying the remaining wood underground, specifically just deep enough that the microbes that consume fallen wood and release the carbon within can’t survive. Biomass burial could lead to more than 12 billion tons of carbon sequestered annually, which would be good for 0.35 degrees Celsius, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience. It’s poetic — burning long-buried forests got us into this mess after all — but also would not exactly involve clear-cutting the forests of the world to save our own skin. Globally, trees in logging-focused forests take up 170 billion tons of carbon a year, 14 billion tons of which end up in wood. As long as that wood — plus the sawmill debris, the branches cut ahead of processing and the eventual wood — ends up buried, we’ve come out ahead.
Syris Valentine, Scientific American
Spooky
A new survey found that horror is the most polarizing movie genre, with 22 percent of respondents loving it, 28 percent liking it, 23 percent disliking it and 22 percent hating it. That “hate” figure is three times the level of the nearest runners up: a three-way tie between the western, fantasy and science fiction genres. The most-loved genre is comedy, which was loved by 46 percent of respondents and liked by 43 percent. This study is fascinating because the results could not be more opposed to what the box office is telling us. Horror movies regularly post amazing returns on investment and possess a dedicated fanbase that shows up to the movie theater. On the other hand, the major studio comedy is completely dead and buried because nobody goes to see them anymore, and you can barely get a romcom greenlit in 2025 because they tend to bomb badly. If anything, it shows that polarization can be an asset; action, adventure and drama have looted the corpse of the studio comedy, which is why every action or adventure film is snarky and funny now, and plenty of dramas are dramedies.
We Considered Ourselves To Be A Powerful Culture
After two decades of work, a $10 billion vitrification plant built to seal radioactive waste in glass at the polluted Hanford Plant in Washington state has come online. The Hanford plant produced the plutonium pits that served as the basis of American nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. However, the manufacturing effort resulted in 325 million liters of liquid waste that was stored in 177 carbon steel tanks, many of which have rather understandably corroded given the sludge within. This new plant aims to mix 5500 liters of nuclear waste with molten silicate to create one inert log of glass, which can be stored much more effectively than the current arrangement.
Analysis
When researchers want to find chemicals from a predetermined list in the systems of animals under study, they use a technique called targeted analysis. Improvements to the emerging techniques of non-targeted analysis — where blood or tissue samples are screened for a broader array of chemicals — have caught on, and have been able to track the PFAS chemicals causing mysterious problems in alligators who live in the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. The new technology has also helped narrow down the origin of sick and dead sea lions off the coast of California, even after the elimination of DDT from the food chain. That latter study of sea lion blubber found 194 halogen-based chemicals, including DDT, in marine mammals in the Southern California Bight. It’s believed these some of these chemical come from undiscovered containers of DDT and DDT byproducts that were dumped off Santa Catalina Island and had begun to leak.
Bricks
A startup working on industrial heat batteries has linked up with an unlikely partner — an oil company — in its quest to commercialize its carbon-free alternative battery. Holmes Wester Oil Corp uses gas-fired boilers in its oil recovery system, but has replaced one of them with Rondo Energy’s battery. It is a 100-megawatt-hour solar array used to heat up clay bricks with electricity. This heat is eventually used to power a boiler that forces oil out of the ground. As a result, the oil company avoids 13,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, and the clay battery company gets a pretty fascinating guinea pig.
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Numlock Sunday: Paris Martineau on those radioactive shrimp
This week, I spoke to the great Paris Martineau who wrote What Is Really Going on With All This Radioactive Shrimp? for Consumer Reports.
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I hate horror movies, and have ever since I was a kid.