Numlock News: October 3, 2024 • Pink Floyd, Elephants, Voyager 2

Oct 03, 2024

Money

Pink Floyd is selling its recorded music, name and likeness rights to Sony Music for $400 million, one of the largest deals for an artist’s library and one that comes after several decades of infighting among the band. The deal does not include songwriting, which is still held by the band members who wrote the songs, and locks down one of the most valuable remaining catalogs of music at Sony, which has spent over $1 billion bagging the catalogs of the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Queen. Unfortunately, there is simply no song in existence, let alone one by Pink Floyd, that accurately captures the motivations of why a band might accept $400 million for their music — none whatsoever.

Jem Aswad, Variety

Voyager 2

The Voyager 2 space probe, launched in 1977, is 12 billion miles (19.31 billion kilometers) away from Earth. It’s slowly but surely running out of power, and in order to extend the life of the spacecraft, NASA switched off its plasma science instrument, which measures the flow of charged atoms. The plasma instrument on its counterpart, Voyager 1 — which is 15 billion miles (24.14 billion kilometers) from Earth — was turned off in 2007. There are now four remaining instruments left operational on Voyager 2, and it’s currently estimated to keep sending back data through some point in the 2030s.

Adithi Ramakrishnan, The Associated Press

Rainforest

The rainforests in the Republic of Congo are home to elephants and gorillas, and those animals as well as other megafauna spend time moving between different muddy, open clearings of grass and sedges called bais. These neat areas are visible in satellite imagery, and only recently has the network of bais become clear. Researchers identified 13 known bais and analyzed 2 million camera trap images, finding that they’re crucial gathering grounds for many different kinds of animals seeking nutrient-rich soils, roots and grazing. The team used LIDAR-equipped drones to scan the forest, tracking down trails connecting 220 known bais to find thousands more hidden ones. According to the study published in Ecology, they managed to find 2,176 throughout a national park the size of Connecticut.

Zhengyang Wang, Scientific American

College Presidents

College president used to be a relatively cushy gig, glad-handing bigwigs fleecing rich alumni for donations and cosplaying as a medieval scholar once a year at graduation, living life one tasteful spread of canapés at a time. Then students expected them to do stuff, and then donors and alumni got mad at them for considering doing that stuff, and then other donors and alumni got mad at them for not doing that stuff, and then governors and the board started calling, and all of a sudden this plum gig is getting dicey. The average tenure of a college president was 5.9 years as of 2022, down from 8.5 years in 2006, and it’s been a boom time for the job title of “interim college president,” which is what you call the person who steps into that crucial role of canapé consumption between the “resigning in disgrace” day and the “this whole thing blows over” day.

Melissa Korn, The Wall Street Journal

Connectome

A diagram of the wiring of an animal’s brain is called a “connectome,” a process that’s incredibly labor intensive and difficult to do. This was first accomplished in 1986 in the well-studied nematode C. elegans, connecting 302 neurons. Since then there have been partial connectomes of fly, mouse and human brains, as well as a connectome of the larva of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Since 2018, researchers have been working on building out the connectome of the adult D. melanogaster, and a nine-paper package published in Nature yesterday pulls that scientific miracle off, setting the stage for larger connectome works in zebra fish and mice. There are 149 meters of wiring in a fruit fly’s brain, which is the size of a grain of sand, and it has 54.5 million synapses and 140,000 neurons, of which there are 8,400 types. It’s a huge deal.

Rodrigo Pérez Ortega, Science

Methane

The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a recommendation that the U.S. invest between $150 million and $400 million over the next three to five years on tech to remove methane from air. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes in at 420 parts per million and methane just 2 parts per million, but ton for ton, methane is 80 times as potent a greenhouse gas on a 20-year span and responsible for a third of all global warming at the industrial level. The engineering difficulty is precisely that ppm situation: Right now, there isn’t any tech that can remove methane at concentrations below 1,000 ppm, and again, methane is just 2 ppm in the general atmosphere. Methane removal tech is in use at big emitters like pipelines and landfills, but even so, that’s just 21 percent of methane emissions.

Warren Cornwall, Science

Corner Store

Neighborhood-based retail like small corner stores accessible by a quick walk rather than a drive to a central shopping district are making a comeback. It’s in part thanks to the pandemic, which made people spend lots of time in their own neighborhood, but helped along by changes in zoning in several cities that are making it possible to open up small shops and restaurants in residential neighborhoods, mixed use that has in many places been exorcised from the zoning law by overzealous car-centric planners after World War II. The math is basic: A 1,200-square-foot shop needs to clear about $1,000 per day in sales to make rent and pay market wages, which means it’s got to be within a quarter-mile of 1,000 households, opening up a lot of parts of midsized cities to potential new shops.

Linda Baker, Bloomberg

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: The Internationalists · Video Game Funding · BYD · Disney Channel Original Movie · Talon Mine · Our Moon · Rock Salt · Wind Techs ·