Numlock News: June 6, 2023 • Rooibos, Durian, Noovie

Jun 6

By Walt Hickey

Noovie

National CineMedia is the company founded in 2007 by Regal, AMC and Cinemark theaters to crank out in-theater advertising — think the Noovie segment by the one and only Maria Menounos — ahead of films. That relationship became frayed following the pandemic, the subsequent Chapter 11 of Regal parent Cineworld, and a lawsuit alleging the broach of a deal with Regal over ads. This is a huge amount of money for the notoriously slim-margin theater business: Since 2007, Regal was paid $1.3 billion by NCM, an average of $58 million a year from 2015 to 2019 that was threatened by the change in business. Anyway, NCM and Regal have cut a 10-year deal, which is a solid sign for the future of the exhibition business.

Etan Vlessing, The Hollywood Reporter

eDNA

A new study found that the same devices that collect data on weather indicators are incidentally really effective at aggregating the DNA of animals that passed through the area, meaning that the many weather monitors spotting the globe can also be effectively parlayed into biology research. The researchers extracted and sequenced DNA in a single monitor in suburban London and an 8-month-old filter from a station in Scotland and found environmental DNA from 180 plants, fungi, insects and mammals, including 34 different birds. This could help in the passive monitoring of migratory and endangered species.

Elizabeth Pennisi, Science

Five Stars

While the five-star system originally endeavored to accurately rate the services of the entities so rated, today the five stars are essentially a binary when it comes to gig work; one give five stars if the service was sufficient, and fewer than five stars if one wants to singlehandedly destroy the livelihood of the service worker they recently encountered. It’s grade inflation on the aggregate scale: Ride-sharing apps like Lyft will deactivate drivers who get lower than 4.6. The average Uber passenger in the U.S. is rated 4.9 out of 5. It varies the world over; the average U.S. Airbnb is 4.7 out of 5, while the average overseas property is 4.63 out of 5. Given Pride Month, this is a mess — when everyone is a pleasure to have in class, no one is.

Preetika Rana, The Wall Street Journal

Mussel Crap

A new study looked at how effective blue mussels are at filtering out microplastics in seawater, finding that in field trials 5 kilograms of mussels were able to remove 240 microplastic particles per day from an inlet. Published in Journal of Hazardous Materials, it wasn’t just about how effective mussels were at consuming inedible chunks of microscopic plastic, but that they’re rather excellent at aggregating and excreting them in a manner where they would eventually hit bottom. The average sinking rate of the mussel feces was up to 278 meters per day, meaning that eventually the microplastics might get trapped in the seafloor sediment. That said, scaling up may be an issue, as it would take millions of mussels in a bay to treat the water consistently.

Robin Donovan, Science

Durian

China consumes 1 million tonnes of durian — a pungent-smelling fruit — annually, all of which were historically imported from places like Vietnam, which exports 87 percent of its durian crop to China. Given the demand, China has been attempting to grow their own, and in March projected that 2,450 tonnes would be grown domestically in Hainan. Given the immaturity of the trees, this ended up being a miss: Hainan will only produce 50 tonnes of durian this year, or approximately 0.005 percent of all the durian eaten in China.

Amanda Lee, South China Morning Post

Rooibos

Rooibos is a plant native to South Africa’s Cederberg Mountains, specifically lands of the indigenous Khoisan people. The plant is used in an eponymous infusion that is increasingly popular in cafes the world over, a caffeine-free earthy beverage full of the antioxidants that people really seem to go for these days. Exports of rooibos are up from 500 tons in 1996 to 9,000 tons today, and after successful lobbying and negotiating the Khoisan people are finally benefitting from this. An attempt by Nestlé to patent rooibos for cosmetic and health uses that the Khoisan people have been doing for generations ticked everyone off, eventually bringing to the Khoisan leaders to cut a deal with the industry where their contributions to cultivating rooibos were acknowledged and they are paid 1.5 percent of the value of total unprocessed rooibos production, which amounted to 12.2 million Rand ($642,000) in 2022.

Tommy Trenchard, NPR

Hippos

Pablo Escobar notoriously owned several hippos in a private zoo, which escaped, and are now thriving on the Magdalena river, expanding to what were projected to be 98 hippos that the government is aggressively attempting to spay and neuter. Well, bad news, a new study utilizing in-person counting, drone observation and more tracking methods has updated the number of thriving hippos in Colombia, up to 181 to 215 beasts thriving amid a lack of predators and ample food. According to the research, chemical castration could take 45 years to eradicate the hippos, while capture, transport, castration and return would take 52 years.

Luke Taylor, Nature

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