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Numlock News: November 7, 2023 • Wildcats, Juice, Elephantfish

Nov 7

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By Walt Hickey

This Thursday night is the Chapel Hill event at Flyleaf Books for You Are What You Watch! RSVP here, the signing starts at 5:30 and the talk begins at 6 p.m.

Then, on Sunday, November 12 at 11:15 a.m. I’ve got a panel at the free-to-attend Texas Book Festival in Austin, you can see my specific event here. I will also be in Austin all weekend for the event, so if you’re only around on Saturday don’t hesitate to shoot me an email or DM. My roadtrip ends in D.C. next Tuesday for a fun (and streamed) event at East City Books that I’m told is filling up rather quick.

Records

A new report published Monday found that it is remarkably easy to buy information about currently-serving members of the military from data brokers with few if any strings attached. When researchers tried to buy data from 12 data brokers from email domains in the U.S. and Asia pursuing thousands of records about American service members, most were delighted to oblige. The study, funded partially by West Point, was prompted after a search found 533 data brokers willing to hawk information about the troops, and ended up buying eight data sets from three brokers with 4,951 to 15,000 identifiable records, all for the cost of $0.12 to $0.32 per record.

Tate Ryan-Mosley, MIT Technology Review

Fruit Flies

Los Angeles County has found Mediterranean fruit flies, and for a state that produces an enormous volume of fruit and produce, the arrival of that destructive pest has sent the state into a tizzy and an elaborate quarantine to try to eradicate the insect. The California Department of Food and Agriculture has ordered a quarantine for fruit trees in an 88-square-mile area, prompting insecticide rollout and even more elaborate measures to come. Over the coming months, every three to four days a quarter-million sterile male fruit flies per square mile will be airdropped into a 9-square-mile area, with the hope that the influx of sterile males will cause a reproductive crisis for the bugs.

Nathan Solis, Los Angeles Times

Wildcats

A new study has found that in the wild, the Scottish wildcat has all but disappeared thanks to breeding with domestic cats. For 2,000 years of living beside one another, the wild cats and the domestic cats lived alongside one another without much interbreeding. Only about 70 years ago did the species begin to mate in the wild, and now their genomes share considerably more genetic material. As of the 1950s, only 5 percent of their genetic markers overlapped, but by 1997 that was as high as 74 percent. The hope for the independence of the species is likely in the 160 Scottish wildcats in captivity, which only have 18 percent of DNA markers overlapping with domestic cats.

David Grimm, Science

Latinos

Though Hispanic and Latino people are 19 percent of the American population, with 62.1 million people total, a new study out of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that only 5.5 percent of speaking characters in top-performing movies are Hispanic or Latino. This number has not changed in 16 years, despite the Hispanic population in the United States rising 23 percent over the past decade. The median budget for a movie led by a Latino lead was $10 million, compared to $25 million among films not led by a Latino actor. Overall, just 4.6 percent of directors were Hispanic of Latino.

Rebecca Sun, The Hollywood Reporter

Anxiety

Researchers in Australia, as part of an experiment into better ways to help teens develop resilience and better mental health, assigned 1,000 teens to one of two health classes, one of which followed a standard curriculum and the other of which taught them a specific set of techniques from the DBT school of therapy. The experiment failed completely, and the teens in the DBT program — who were taught coping strategies and life skills — had worse relationships with parents, increases in depression and anxiety, were less emotionally regulated and had a reported lower quality of life compared to the group who just took normal health. Reaching kids in a way that actually helps them has always been a bit of a crapshoot — remember D.A.R.E.? — but has never been so immediately necessary, as a 2021 survey found that 57 percent of teen girls reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless in 2021, up from 36 percent in 2011.

Olga Khazan, The Atlantic

Juice

Juice is potentially falling out of style as people come around to the idea that even though this stuff gets squeezed out a plant, often fruit juice has similar sugar content to things like soda. In the United States, the average consumption of juice is projected to decline 3.9 percent from 2023 to 2027, and in the past year alone the volume of shelf-stable juice sold in the United States was down 5.6 percent. Taste for juice going out of style comes as it becomes more expensive to buy it, too, as prices are up 12.7 percent. It’s prompting the juice producers to come out with reduced- or no-sugar versions of their products so they can avoid getting squeezed by the invisible hand of the market.

Chris Casey, Food Dive

Elephantnose

The elephantnose fish is nocturnal, lives in muddy rivers and uses electrolocation to see, wiggling about underwater and emitting a bit of electricity and then using the distortions in the water to detect other creatures. A new study tried to figure out precisely how the fish was comprehending the world, and found that the wiggling is absolutely critical to the fish developing a 3D model of its world. The fish had an accuracy rate of 93 percent identifying a recognizable shape of food when they had plenty of room to wiggle, but when they shrunk the space the fish could move around to just 2.5 inches across, which limits the fish’s ability to wiggle, the accuracy dipped to 71 percent.

Elizabeth Anne Brown, Scientific American

Thanks to everyone who has left a review for my book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

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