By Walt Hickey

Modern-Day Augury

Most of the year, white-tailed tropicbirds are hanging out at sea, and then every year they go to Bermuda to breed in what has historically been a sign that spring is here. Anecdotally, birdwatchers started noticing that the birds were showing up early, and that could be a bad sign for the ocean. A team of researchers analyzed data going back decades about the tropicbird population and sightings of it, and found that since the 1950s the average date of the first observation of a white-tailed longtail is now 20 to 25 days earlier, a one-day shift every three years. That means the birds are now arriving in Bermuda in February, not March. Listen, I’m a reasonable guy, and I’ve never been particularly inclined to practice augury to foretell dire omens or discern the will of fate itself from the movements of birds, but I gotta say this does seem pretty bad?

Rebecca Heisman, Hakai Magazine

All these worlds are yours, except Europa; I have dibs

A new study based on data collected during the Juno spacecraft’s flyby of Jupiter’s moon Europa in 2022 at a distance of 219 miles finds some disappointing results for those hoping that the moon would have interesting amounts of oxygen on its surface. Before the flyby, estimates based on telescope observations of oxygen in Europa’s ice approximated that the planet’s surface was producing as much as 1,100 kilograms of oxygen per second. The data from the flyby counters that, and the team calculated that between 6 and 18 kilograms of oxygen are produced every second, well below expectations and a bit of a disappointment for those who were hopeful Europa could sustain life.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

Emulate

Yuzu is an emulator that allows its users to play Nintendo Switch games on a PC or an Android phone, with the mild issue being that Nintendo has not and won’t ever authorize the software to actually do that. Following a suit, Yuzu will shut down, delete their code, and pay Nintendo $2.4 million. Yuzu was a bit of a flagrant actor here — its Patreon was racking up $30,000 a month, reportedly — but the case spells a serious issue for emulators in general, not just the ones that pirates love. For instance, the 3DS emulator Citra is now dead thanks to the legal crossfire, since its developers were involved in Yuzu, and it’s got the emulator developers who strive to make tech to preserve gaming history skittish because the 3DS is simply not an active platform anymore.

Luke Plunkett, Aftermath

Exons

A new study published in Evolution looked at so-called “living fossils,” which are species that have not evolved in any significant way for long periods of time, and sought to figure out which of them were, indeed, the slowest when it came to developing mutations. There are lots of animals that have looked essentially the same for millions of years, such as coelacanths and horseshoe crabs, but one stands above all others when it comes to their DNA repair rate and thus timelessness: gars, a type of fish found to have the slowest rate of evolution of any vertebrate with a jaw. The researchers analyzed 1,100 exons from the genomes of 478 species, and found that gars on average had just 0.00009 mutations per million years, way slower than placental mammals (which averaged 0.02 mutations per million years), amphibians (0.007 mutations per million years), or other living fossils (0.0005 mutations per million years).

Amanda Heidt, Science

Planets

A new paper published in the Journal of Science Communication analyzed 142 planets from science fiction novels, films, television and more, and attempted to understand how the representation of planets outside our solar system has evolved in pop culture over the years. The inflection point found in the data set was 1995, which is around when the first planet orbiting another sun-like star was first discovered. Prior to that, lots of the representation of other worlds rendered them remarkably Earth-like, with higher proportions of Earth-like habitable planets present in science fiction. After that — when writers perhaps heard about worlds where it rains diamonds, or is covered in lava — things began to get weirder.

International School of Advanced Studies

Table for Six

Restaurants are beginning to turn away or tax large parties of eight or more, and sometimes even six or more, as the larger groups can slow down service and take up time at tables. Some restaurants want big deposits, others simply say they can’t accommodate them, and it’s making booking small parties annoying. One solution is to force large parties to book at 5 or 8 p.m., outside of the main dinner rush. Groups of six or more are rare, according to an analysis of reservations booked in 2023 on Resy, accounting for just 8 percent of reservations. A slim majority of reservations on the platform are for tables for two.

Alina Dizik, The Wall Street Journal

Tip

Young people are excellent tippers, according to a new analysis of data composed of 2,239 visits to beer taprooms, with younger drinkers being considerably more generous than older tippers. Those aged 21 to 25 averaged a 27.5 percent tip rate, one that declined steadily to 25.0 percent among those in the 36 to 40 age bracket, followed by a bumpy decline to 23.2 percent tip rate among those aged 56 or older. The average age of a hospitality industry employee working in places that sling alcohol is 35.2 years old, meaning that young patrons are often served by young bartenders.

Olivia White, Vine Pair

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