Numlock News: September 25, 2024 • Vaquita, Banana, Arrowheads

Sep 25, 2024

Neon

The Neon Museum is an attraction in Las Vegas that is a massive, open-air collection of historical neon signs. It’s currently able to display only 35 percent of the roughly 500 signs in its collection on its 2.27-acre campus, which goes back to the 1930s, and also has a collection of 10,000 photographs and postcards in a medium of signage that has gradually been going extinct amid the rise of the LED. The museum will soon start a $45 million expansion and relocation to a space in the Arts District by 2027, with a 60,000-square-foot rooftop and a 47,000-square-foot exhibition space, as well as 35,000 additional square feet nearby. Last year the attraction saw 200,000 visitors, and had to turn away 30,000 due to capacity.

Gabriella Angeleti, The Art Newspaper

Fight

Researchers have been studying what is now thought to be the site of an ancient battle on the banks of the Tollense River in northern Germany that has been dated to 3,200 years ago, taking place around 1250 BCE. They’ve found 60 arrowheads at the site, and one sign that this might have been a scuffle and not just an archery competition or friendly hunting trip is the 150 skeletons and myriad bones with grievous injuries that also happen to litter the landscape. The question of who was fighting who has been addressed with a new study that compared the arrowheads — some of which were embedded in human bones; again, I think we have a smoking gun here — to a catalog of 4,743 Bronze Age arrowheads found across central and northern Europe. A few of them were gnarly little barbed bronze arrowheads that were being produced south of the Alps, indicating that the battle was one of all sorts of cross-continental raids that were in vogue for (checks notes) the entire duration of European history before they figured out soccer and Eurovision.

Andrew Curry, Science

Black Holes

Black holes with the mass of an asteroid but the size of an atom might be zipping around the universe, primordial black holes created in the wake of the big bang. A new study published in Physical Review D argues it’s plausible that a black hole with a mass of 10¹⁷ to 10²³ grams might pass through our solar system something like every 10 years, and any that come through close enough to be near a planet or moon ought to produce a wobble in them detectable with certain instruments. For instance, the distance of Mars from Earth is known within 10 centimeters, and if such a black hole were to pass by it would cause Mars to move in a manner well above the threshold of measurable precision.

Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American

Vaquita

Vaquita are a nearly extinct species of porpoise that lives in the Gulf of California. They’re nearly extinct because they get caught up in gillnets left in the water by poachers trying to illegally catch totoaba, which are large fish that command very high prices in no small part due to the popularity of their swim bladders in some forms of traditional medicine in China. Catching totoaba has been illegal since 1975 and gillnets have been banned since 2017, but poachers don’t care. Scientists spotted just six to eight vaquita in a 2024 survey, down from eight to 13 in 2023. Mexican authorities and conservationists have policed poaching zealously, but listen, the scoreboard doesn’t exactly lie here, and one wing of conservationists is pitching something out of the ordinary: tolerating or legalizing totoaba fishing in San Felipe with the condition that the gillnets are, finally and forever, gone.

Daniel Shailer, Hakai Magazine

Ownership

Rich guys who buy NFL teams often worm their way into their franchises’ vaunted Ring of Honor by virtue of being the guy who owns the Ring of Honor. Take, for instance, Arthur Blank, who entered into immortality for the Atlanta Falcons this past Sunday, joining over a dozen former and current NFL owners who had the gall to get themselves in their own team’s Hall of Fame or Ring of Honor. There’s still one honor eluding some owners: Only 16 have been included in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and the rich guys on the cusp of Canton but nevertheless locked out due to lack of support from voters — reportedly including a certain Patriotic individual first and foremost — are seething at their snubs.

Eric Jackson, Sportico

Banana

The banana plant is technically an enormous herb, not a tree, and was first domesticated in Papua New Guinea about 7,000 years ago. As it’s caught on globally, a dominant varietal has tended to take over the overwhelming majority of cultivated acreage. Famously, this was the Gros Michel variety until a fungus wiped it out in the 1950s and ’60s; today the main banana is the Cavendish, but fungal diseases like Tropical Race 4 and black sigatoka have cultivators skittish about the fruit’s future. All that said, there are hundreds if not thousands of wild banana varieties, with a gene bank in Belgium storing the DNA of 1,600 banana varieties — and researchers are looking for more all the time. One researcher, Gabriel Sachter-Smith, has identified 500 varieties in the wild and has 170 finds in the Belgium bank, and his team has identified 170 varieties on New Britain, 61 on Bougainville, 18 in the Cook Islands and 15 on Samoa.

Jack Truesdale, The New York Times

Discount

The average discount offered by companies online has been getting a little lighter. It’s not just you: Sales simply aren’t as good as they used to be. When offered, the average discount from online retailers is down to 36 percent this year, down from an average of 42 percent in 2019. That year, 42 percent of all stock was discounted one way or another, while this year through July, only 28 percent of items had some kind of discount flagged. That said, it might not be that bad; most discounts happen at the end of the year, with November to December 2023 seeing about half of all items stocked on retailer websites discounted in some manner.

Chris Stokel-Walker, Sherwood News

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