By Walt Hickey

Super Mario Maker

The most compelling story in gaming is the quixotic quest to complete tens of thousands of as-yet unbeaten levels uploaded to Super Mario Maker on the Wii U before Nintendo wipes them from their servers. After months of work, we’re down to 6 remaining unfinished levels (as of midnight ET) that must be completed before Nintendo deletes the servers in April, and my God it’s compelling. A week ago, there were 178 levels left, a year ago tens of thousands. The biggest impediment to victory appears to be a level called “Trimming the Herbs,” which takes mere seconds to fail, requiring players to nail a series of maneuvers with accuracy within one-sixtieth of a second. All told, there have been over 58,279 attempts of Trimming the Herbs so far.

Dustin Bailey, Games Radar and Team 0%

Pineapple

Del Monte, the pineapple colossus, announced on Monday that it will introduce a new, smaller version of the fruit. To be clear, and I cannot emphasize this enough, if you have not seen the way that a pineapple actually grows I have some fascinating and also disturbing news for you. That all said, the Precious Honeyglow, which weighs between 1.5 to 2.0 pounds and is half the size of an ordinary pineapple, was designed to be a year-round, reasonably-sized alternative to the otherwise large and party-defining fruit.

Nathan Owens, FoodDive

Livestreams

Overall, China’s real estate market is in a bad way, with Country Garden’s sales down 74 percent year over year. An exception is a boomtown forming around Xishuangbanna, a city in Yunnan province near the border of Myanmar and Laos that has seen property sales surge, mainly from people moving into town. Sales were up 69.4 percent year over year in the January to October period, and 80 percent of those sales came from outside the province. In 2023, livestreams on the Kuaishou app sold 50 billion yuan’s worth ($6.84 billion) of homes.

Caiwei Chen, Rest of World

Planes

Cirrus clouds absorb radiation that bounces off the surface of the Earth, and the contrails of airplanes have a similar effect, with some estimates attributing a significant amount of warming to the incidental water vapor trails of planes. Only 2 percent to 10 percent of flights are responsible for 80 percent of contrails, and new research indicates that slight reroutes of planes can have very big effects. By simulating 85,000 American Airlines flights, a new study published in Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability found that adjusting 14 percent of flights led to a reduction in the warming effect of contrails by 73 percent, increasing fuel costs by 0.11 percent and overall costs by 0.08 percent. Finally, the “contrails are important” crazy uncle and the “we need to address climate change” niece will have something to talk about this Thanksgiving. And thus, social progress was made.

James Temple, MIT Technology Review

All You Create, All You Destroy

Archaeoastronomy is a field that seeks to align astronomical events with recorded events within archaeology, especially eclipses. The times in which the moon directly obscured the sun are often noted in ancient documents, which helps to assign a reliable date to them. Any given point on Earth is expected to experience a solar eclipse once every 375 years on average. Among the oldest recorded eclipses is a clay tablet from Ugarit that saw an eclipse shortly before a coup, an eclipse that has been traced to Mars appearing near to an eclipse that we know hit on March 5, 1222 BCE. What makes this interesting is that the length of Earth’s day does change over time, with the length of a day on Earth increasing 18 microseconds every year, which adds up to hours over the course of a couple thousand years.

Sarah Sadavoy, The Conversation

Bats

Alaska has bats, specifically Myotis lucifugus, the little brown bat. They’re charming little beasties, they’re slow to reproduce and can live for decades, and they weigh less than 10 grams. Incidentally, I love them. A fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome has ravaged bats across the continent, claiming an estimated 6.7 million bat lives since first detection in 2006, and it’s been seen in 40 states so far. While some genetically resilient species have rebounded, it’s a plague among bats, and mortality rates range between 90 to 100 percent. At some point, the fungus will arrive in Alaska, but the hope is that the unique metabolic habits of the ittle brown bat will save it from serious peril.

Trina Moyles, Hakai Magazine

Bring The Thunder

The government of Oklahoma is hit by cybercriminals 17 million times per day, presumably by radical factions that seek to steal their Thunder. The state’s 30,000-strong workforce began working from home in 2020, and as they called into work through a new VPN things began to get dicey. The state took IT seriously immediately, and rolled out a single software to 100 of the state’s 180 agencies, in doing so saving the state $875 million.

Chris Teale, Route Fifty

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