Numlock News: April 18, 2023 • Akiya, Hibernation, Tides

Apr 18

By Walt Hickey

Birds

Sega, a video game company built on an iconic animal mascot with an attitude, has purchased Rovio, a video game company built on iconic animal mascots with attitudes, for €706 million. This will bring the hit mobile game Angry Birds into the Sega portfolio and allow the classic games company — best known for Sonic and functionally no other properties — to compete on phones in an era that has seen its ancient rival, Nintendo, continue to dominate. Other rival mobile game companies have also been snapped up by titans of the space, like Activision Blizzard buying King, the maker of Candy Crush, and Take-Two buying Zynga. Rovio’s games have been downloaded over 5 billion times, and Angry Birds has also spawned a series of films within a rapidly growing Diminishing Returns Cinematic Universe.

Jon Porter, The Verge

Lost

Authorities announced that 70 waterproof floating packages in the Mediterranean that were all connected together and attached to a signaling device have been found. According to the Italian Guardia di Finanza — which I assume stands for “the lost and found department of Italy” or something — someone clearly forgot all their waterproof floating packages off the island of Sicily, and they would love to find the person responsible and reunite them, and perhaps scold them for being so careless and forgetting so many packages of the coast of Catania. There are no other clues as to who might have done it, well, except for the part where the packages were filled with two tons of cocaine.

Barbie Latza Nadeau, CNN

Bears

When human patients are immobile for long periods of time, they can develop sometimes deadly blood clots. When bears hibernate, they don’t, and so people trying to solve that first problem are turning to the latter for insights. A new study published last week in Science found that there is a protein that is abundant in the blood of active bears but nearly absent in the blood of hibernating bears — heat shock protein 47, or HSP47 — which would have the effect of reducing blood’s propensity to clot during the long winters. The production levels of HSP47 were 55 times lower in winter than in summer, and they know this because they sent some extremely brave biologists to take blood samples from 13 hibernating bears in their dens in the winter and then again in the summer.

Jack Tamisiea, Scientific American

Akiya

According to government data, as of 2018 there were 8.5 million abandoned vacant homes in Japan, which has experienced both a population decline as well as depopulation in many rural areas. That’s something like 14 percent of the entire country’s housing stock. The Nomura Research Institute estimates the number is even higher, at 11 million such vacant homes — called akiya — and forecasts that by 2033 they could account for 30 percent of all houses in Japan. Municipalities and companies are trying to get them in the hands of younger buyers with cash to upgrade and renovate them. As a person who knows plenty of people obsessed with home remodeling television shows and also someone who knows plenty of weebs, many of whom are married to each other, I think I just came up with the next big HGTV show.

Tim Hornyak, The New York Times

Gate

The NBA and NHL are both in their playoffs, and the teams that made the season-ending tournaments have a bit more to gain from the experience than the franchises in, say, the NFL. For the NFL, only 19 percent of overall revenue comes from selling tickets to watch the games in person, a figure that stands at 27 percent in the NBA and a whopping 44 percent in the National Hockey League. Factor in concessions and parking and the like, and 56 percent of NHL revenue happens at the arenas. That means a big payout for the teams who actually make the playoffs. Last year, for instance, the New York Rangers made $50 million in revenue off the 10 home games they hosted during their playoff run, and league-wide gross ticket revenue in the playoffs was over $200 million.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Tidal

Deriving energy generation from the tides has lots of potential just because there’s so much energy in those waves, with some studies estimating tidal power could produce 150 terawatt hours to 800 terawatt hours of renewable energy annually. That said, a new study highlights one issue that tidal power might have: As the world warms, the tidal profile of estuaries will change, some in ways that turn ideal sites for tidal energy plants into useless ones, or move viable regions within those sites to different places. The study modeled 978 hypothetical estuaries of varying shapes and tidal ranges and rates of sea level rises. Of those 978 simulated estuaries, 54 initially were suited for tidal turbines. However, when simulating an additional meter of sea level rise, that fell to 47 estuaries, and at 2 meters of sea level rise, it fell to 40 places that could still drive turbines.

Doug Johnson, Hakai Magazine

Cults

A new study published in the journal Antiquity describes the discovery of 135 hilltop sites in the Carangas region of Bolivia that featured concentric circles of walls dated between 1250 and 1600 CE that the researchers believe are linked to ancient Andean cults that existed prior to the arrival of Europeans. One site in particular stood out, with two circled walls, the largest 140 meters in diameter, at Waskiri. The region had not yet been well studied due to its harsh climate.

Bob Yirka, Phys.org

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