By Walt Hickey
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Cables
Subsea cables that criss-cross the oceans last about 25 years on average and require consistent upkeep, and when there’s trouble down below, one of the world’s 62 on-call cable repair ships is deployed to make the repair. When a cable is damaged, the owners of the cables (usually a consortium of telecom and tech companies) pool together to fund the $70,000 to $120,000 per day that such a vessel commands. Many of these ships tend to be deployed in the same region consistently; if you’ve got a cable problem off the coast of Africa, for instance, you’re probably calling in the Léon Thévenin to fix it.
Jess Auerbach Jahajeeah and Stephanie Wangari, Rest of World
Steal a Brainrot
One of the hottest games in the world right now is Steal a Brainrot — a game originally built within Roblox where users collect creatures based on internet memes. It’s huge among kids right now. Anyway, the game was licensed to a developer who makes games within Fortnite, where it’s been racking up bonkers numbers. At times, the number of people playing Steal a Brainrot within Fortnite exceeded the number of people playing the battle royale format that defines Fortnite. The game has racked up 542,082 peak concurrent players. It’s very impressive, but still only a fraction of the game’s peak in Roblox, where it recently pulled in 23 million concurrent players at a time.
Daily Carry
Archaeologists investigating an archaeological site in southeast Czech Republic found a cache of tools in abandoned cellars, and they contain charcoal dated to between 29,550 and 30,250 years ago. One of the coolest finds is a bundle of stone tools that appears as if they were wrapped in a leather pouch that had decayed away in the intervening millennia. The 29 tools include blades and points meant for hunting, skinning, cutting wood and other basic tasks that an ancient hunter might have had to contend with. They also showed signs of significant use, with many of the blades worn down. Interestingly, two-thirds of the tools could be traced to glacial flint deposits 130 kilometers away, with the rest coming from 100 kilometers southeast of the site.
Christa Lesté-Lasserre, New Scientist
Franklin Strait
For the past 10 days, the Dutch-flagged cargo ship Thamesborg has been stuck on a shoal in the Arctic Northwest Passage north of Canada. The vessel is currently enveloped in thick fog, and salvage equipment is still en route to dislodge the ship from its grounding in the Franklin Strait. Sea ice conditions are expected to remain favorable for only a few more weeks, as the annual Arctic Ocean ice minimum is mid-September and sea ice begins to return in October. Eagle-eyed The Terror fans will note that the vessel is indeed stuck in that Franklin Strait — the one where the doomed Franklin’s Lost Expedition was stuck in sea ice for two years, causing the mysterious deaths of all hands aboard HMS Terror and HMS Erebus. Needless to say, it’s important for them to sort this whole thing out sooner rather than later.
Downhill
There is no drama quite like running drama — there is a current kerfuffle among the sprinting set since some marathon runners think it’s cheating or at least unsporting to qualify for a major marathon by participating in a race that is mostly downhill. Essentially, big popular races like the Boston Marathon require runners to hit qualification times based on their age in a preliminary race. Some runners have figured out that there are races that are mostly downhill, which critics say makes it easier to qualify. Of the 30,000 or so participants in the Boston Marathon, about 2,000 invitees last year got in by running in races that were 2,000 feet downhill or more. Now, downhill races are obviously arduous in their own ways — my shins hurt at the very thought — but this spring, the Boston Athletic Association announced that it’ll add minutes to the times of runners if they rely on downhill courses to qualify. The Association intends to add five minutes to races with 1,500 to 2,999 feet of elevation loss and 10 minutes to races with 3,000 to 5,999 feet.
Sharon Terlep, The Wall Street Journal
Less
A new survey found that more often than not, people thought that using AI in the creation of made them like something less, feel worse about it or feel less confident in what they learned. If people learn AI was used in the creation of a news article, 56 percent said they’d feel less confident in what they learned, and just seven percent would feel more confident. If they learned AI was used to create a painting, 49 percent said they’d like it less, and just three percent would like it more. Finally, if they learned AI was involved in making a song, 38 percent would like it less, and just three percent would like it more.
Eileen Yam and Brian Kennedy, Pew Research Center
Pachycephalosaur
A fossilized pachycephalosaur dug up in the Gobi Desert is the oldest and most complete skeleton of the dinosaur group yet found. Its new species is called Zavacephale rinpoche. It lived 108 million years ago in the early Cretaceous, and adults grew to about 14 feet long and seven feet tall, weighing 800 to 900 pounds. The specimen discovered predates all of its kin by about 15 million years, and this one was believed to be a juvenile or at least a teenager.
North Carolina State University
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