By Walt Hickey
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Dams
The Nature Conservancy has announced it has finalized a purchase agreement to spend $168 million to purchase and oversee four hydroelectric dams on the Kennebec River in Maine, a crucial step on the path to removing said dams. The four structures are the only remaining obstacles between the mouth of the Kennebec River in the Gulf of Maine and the confluence with the Sandy River. Their removal has long been sought after by advocates for the endangered Atlantic salmon that lost access to their spawning grounds in the Sandy River. There are still five dams further upstream on the Kennebec, but the real prize is eventually unlocking the superior fish habitat of the Sandy River. Two additional dam removal projects on tributaries of the Sandy River mean that 825 miles of river and stream habitat will eventually have uninterrupted access to the Gulf of Maine once again. This could benefit not just Atlantic Salmon but also river herring, Atlantic sturgeon and American eel.
Emmet Gartner, The Maine Monitor
Space Weather
Three spacecraft were launched Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center. They are bound for a 1.5 million-kilometer journey to the L1 Lagrange point, which lies at a gravitationally stable point between the Earth and the Sun where the pull from each cancels the other out. All told, about $1.6 billion worth of missions were riding that single rocket. The star of the show is IMAP, the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, which will study and map the Sun’s heliosphere. The second mission tacked on to the L1-bound carpool is the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, which will observe Earth’s exosphere, a cloud of hydrogen gas around Earth that gradually fades away into space. Finally, the third mission that gave the Falcon 9 rocket permission to use the HOV lane is Space Weather Follow On-L1, which will monitor space weather for NOAA and warn of geomagnetic storms.
Steam
SonixLegend has become the first Steam user to own 40,000 distinct paid games on the Valve platform, with 40,031 games owned, 22,137 DLC and somehow 26,976 wishlisted. According to SteamDB, the user has an account worth $248,000 to $642,000, depending on how big a sale they caught. This is indeed the vast majority of the 45,000 full-profile paid games available on Steam. Of course, SonixLegend is just like the rest of us, and has spent the most time playing 551 hours of the free-to-play Alien Swarm shooter, and has earned one achievement or more in only 261 games.
Kimmel
Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s first show upon returning from suspension smashed records for Jimmy Kimmel Live! viewership, and by a lot. Tuesday’s episode had 6.26 million viewers according to preliminary Nielsen numbers, the largest audience for a standard episode in the 22-year history of the show, about triple the show’s average. Kimmel’s show still managed this feat despite 66 affiliates owned by Nexstar and Sinclair blacking out the show, nailing the record despite not airing in 23 percent of television sets. The YouTube video of the program’s first 28 minutes has passed 15 million views (a record for the channel), and across other social media platforms, the video scored 26 million views.
Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter
Earthquake
A new study out of MIT sought to figure out where exactly the energy released in an earthquake goes. They found that only one percent to eight percent of the energy released in an earthquake goes to shaking. It’s heat that ends up being the biggest release of energy, with the friction of the rocks sliding against each other along a fault line causing underground temperatures to spike high enough to melt quartz. Indeed, between 68 percent and 98 percent of the energy released in the simulated earthquakes in the lab dissipated as heat.
Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American
Arcades
Genda is a rapidly expanding operator of arcades that started in Japan but has been on an acquisition and expansion spree in North America in anticipation that U.S. markets will be potentially massive for the Japanese-style arcades. Genda’s North American business is looking for 72.5 billion yen (US$490 million) in annual revenue by 2030, and has made four acquisitions in the past year that have added 160 amusement arcades and 13,000 game corners to its portfolio. Its latest news is consolidating 14 American subsidiaries into three, and the Dallas-based claw machine operator Kiddleton will soon become Genda Americas.
Richardson Handjaja, Animenomics
Huntington’s
The University College London Huntington’s Disease Centre announced that they had found a type of gene therapy that, after being applied over the course of 12 to 18 hours of brain surgery, slowed Huntington’s Disease by 75 percent in a study that involved 29 patients. It is an incredible achievement in the treatment of a disease that had heretofore been a death sentence. The disease is caused by an error in our DNA called the huntingtin gene. The error turns a normal protein needed in the brain into one that kills neurons, and if one parent has Huntington’s, there’s a 50 percent chance that a child will inherit it.
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Wow about Huntington’s. Just wow. PS: ‘Star of the show” I see what you did there!