By Walt Hickey
Games
The entire sector of “real-money games” was banned in India on August 22 with the passage of the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act. The new legislation appears set to wipe out an industry that generated revenues of 180 billion rupees (US$2.04 billion) in 2024. Mobile Premier League said it’s poised to lose half its revenue. Dream11, the largest fantasy sports platform in the country, is expecting to see revenue drop 95 percent, prompting it to drop its sponsorship of the Indian national cricket team.
Flights
There are not many hobbies where making a mild error in your pastime will summon an F-16, but civilian aviation is one. The Air Force intervenes when any plane enters restricted airspace in the United States, regardless of the size of the aircraft, and more small planes have been crossing lines lately. The North American Aerospace Defense Command has already intercepted 37 civilian aircrafts through August 21 of this year, which would put us on pace to match the 72 intercepts from last year. Prior to that, NORAD had not intercepted more than 40 civilian aircrafts going back to 2017, and typically the level is between 30 and 40 interceptions per year.
Andrew Tangel, The Wall Street Journal
Telescope
A new study from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and NASA presents a unique design for an orbiting telescope that might be able to solve a particularly thorny optics problem. In order to see an Earth-sized planet from a Sun-sized star at a distance of 30 light-years, you need a telescope with a 20-meter diameter mirror. That’s simply not possible with current tech; the James Webb Space Telescope is the biggest mirror ever launched into space, coming in at a 6.5-meter diameter, and even that is a miracle of engineering. The new study has a proposed fix, though: a 20-meter-long, one-meter-wide mirror that can be rotated to capture multiple images from different orientations. Designers believe it could satisfy NASA’s proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory goal of finding 25 habitable exoplanets within 3.5 years.
Play
A new study of 2,568 children aged 7 to 12 years in a multi-year research program found that 34 percent of children do not play outdoors on school days. Even on the weekends, 20 percent of the cohort is not playing outdoors. This is an issue, as outdoor play is one of the more reliably linked activities for social and emotional development of kids.
Tom Seymour, University of Exeter
Farms
The largest farms are responsible for the vast majority of the market share for agriculture in the United States, and it’s not particularly close. There are just under 2 million farms in the United States, and six percent of them — 105,384 large farms — hold 78 percent of the market share across the country. The remaining 1.8 million farms hold the other 22 percent of the market. In meatpacking, it’s even more consolidated; just four large firms process 81 percent of U.S. cattle and 65 percent of hogs.
Brooke Larsen and Nick Underwood, High Country News
Fiber Optics
A new design for fiber optic cables described in Nature Photonics could significantly improve the current efficiency of transmission lines, not to mention it could be viable at scale. The current structure of a fiber optic cable is composed of many thin wires of solid glass. The new system is a sort of nested tube fiber structure, with five small cylinders, each with two nested cylinders constituting the fiber. Current optical fibers lose half the light they transmit every 15 kilometers to 20 kilometers because it gets absorbed by the glass. The new proposed design loses half the light every 33 kilometers and can carry 1,000 times as much power.
Davide Castelvecchi, Scientific American
Turtles
The eastern Pacific green turtle is one of 11 genetically distinct populations of green sea turtles, and has been found in Hawai’i, the Galápagos Islands and Mexico. Increasingly, they’re found way north of Mexico, choosing to nest and hatch as far north as Monterey Bay in California. This was first observed in the 1970s, and protections that came into effect in the U.S. in 1978 and Mexico in 1990 helped numbers bounce back from the brink. The species was first reported in San Diego Bay in 1976, but as the population rebounded in Mexico — 27,000 nesters came ashore to Colola Beach in 2024, up from 212 nesting females in 1992 — it seems the turtles have sought new foraging grounds.
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Farming is complicated... I have several friends who are farmers or who know smart farmers that are thriving at different sized (mostly small) farms with cutting edge techniques and smart rotation of crops to keep the soil healthy. But they also complain about other small farmers who buy up land and don't know what they're doing, seemingly messing everything up but also getting by on subsidies. Smaller isn't necessarily better; better is better.
When smart farmers do well, they buy more land and aren't small anymore. If you can't make money farming and are actively hurting the soil with bad practices, please stop farming and sell or put in a solar array please.
I get the "if the industry gets too big then they have too much lobbying power!" problem, but that's like every industry we have. Seems like that problem should be addressed directly instead of just breaking up farms/companies that get too big. The problem isn't the bigness (we should want good farmers/companies to get big and take advantage of economies of scale), it's the abuse of power and poor regulation.
/rant (sorry, I didn't mean for that to become a rant)