By Walt Hickey

Podcasts

Enterprising actors are making money by pretending to be podcasters or guests on video for the purposes of advertisements, all for the sake of injecting at-a-glance believable social content for TikTok that feels otherwise native to the platform. These faux podcasts shill a product, and the hope is that the casual scroller is distracted enough that they think it’s just an actual podcast clip. One actor who sells his services to brands is paid $195 per one-minute ad, and clears between $9,000 and $16,000 per month. Brands are now actively seeking actors willing to play guests on scripted or staged podcasts, essentially the TikTok version of the 4 a.m. infomercial airing on cable.

Ashley Carman, Bloomberg

Jake

A strange and existentially disturbing strategy being employed by brands is to immerse their mascots into the real world. This is, at best, unnerving when it’s a guy in the Mickey Mouse suit or a Pop Tart costume or the Burger King, but it’s hitting a new level as State Farm has attempted to turn spokes-character Jake from State Farm into a presence at various events. To be clear, Jake is not a man, but a character played by human man Kevin Miles, who serves a role akin to a djinn within the fiction of State Farm advertisements in which he can be summoned to assess property damage. Jake nevertheless has 1.2 million followers on TikTok, and has appeared at BravoCon, sat with Donna Kelce at an Eagles game, and has begun to just appear places. In a new obscenity, State Farm has arranged to have Jake be among the first people to congratulate Caitlin Clark upon her inevitable high draft in the WNBA draft, turning the achievement of a lifetime into a trite ad for insurance.

Jacob Feldman, Sportico

Not All Who Wander Are Lost; Some Are Just Bad at Directions

Some people seem to have an innate sense of direction, and scientists are curious as to why. In one study of some 4 million players of a navigation game designed for a phone, researchers found that city-dwellers from cities that had more chaotic street networks were considerably better than city-dwellers from places with more organized street networks, essentially showing that the serpentine and chaotic old-world cities may produce better innate navigators that those who live on grids. Another study looking at 294 subjects managed to group them into three categories: those who make good mental maps (and can improvise between known routes), those who have good route knowledge (excellent in known territory, bad outside of it) and a third group that, er, just wasn’t really good at any of that. I’d hesitate before forwarding this article to gently rib one of your loved ones who is firmly in group three, as they’ll be quite mad about it and will certainly let you have it the minute they actually get around to finding you, God bless ‘em.

Bob Holmes, Knowable Magazine

Bears

A new study published in Biological Conservation sought to figure out a safe, convenient way to deter grizzly bears from encountering humans at sites where, for instance, some grain has spilled from storage bins. Livestock guardian dogs have traditionally had a very specific role — they guard livestock, says it all there in the name — but for the study were set to be stationed on farms in Montana regularly visited by the grizzlies. The GPS data collected from the study found that there was an 88 percent reduction in the number of bears that came within 300 meters of farms with dogs, and those that did make an attempt to go to those farms spent 94 percent less time at the farms with dogs than the control group.

Gennaro Tomma, Science

Chips

On every computer chip, separating and insulating the copper wires is a material called a dielectric. The dielectric film placed between the chip and the structure underneath is produced as an incredibly thin sheet, and for the past three decades a single Japanese company has had over 90 percent market share in dielectric film. That company is Ajinomoto, which connoisseurs may better know as the company that is the leading global supplier of MSG seasoning powder. In the ‘90s, Ajinomoto found that one of the byproducts of MSG production was a dielectric insulator, and thus a monopoly was born. They have nothing whatsoever to do with making computer chips beyond this one thing. Given recent investments in chips, some new companies intend to challenge Ajinomoto’s domination in the market.

James O’Donnell, MIT Technology Review

Couches

Office couches are back as more offices convert space to host the couches that employees who no longer work from home may be missing. Demand is up, and office couches — unique compared to home sofas, and tending to be less cushiony and more firm — are in high demand. Before the pandemic, 12 percent of office space was lounges and huddle rooms, but in 2023 that has since risen to 19.3 percent of office space.

Anne Marie Chaker, The Wall Street Journal

Minerals

In November, Google’s DeepMind division claimed that their AI tool GNoME found 2.2 million new crystals, of which 384,870 are stable materials that could be used in future tech, an achievement that they claimed pushed the science forward substantially. Outside researchers who attempted to verify those claims have, in a new perspective paper published in Chemical Materials, expressed serious misgivings about that claim. A team selected a random sample of the 384,870 proposed structure and found that not a single one met a three-part test of being credible, useful or novel. They also call out 18,000 proposed compounds that contain elements that are only available in minute quantities, or are far too radioactive to actually have any utility whatsoever in materials science. DeepMind stands by its paper.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media

A real great one in this week’s Sunday Edition! I spoke to Christie Aschwanden, who hosts the brand-new podcast Uncertain for Scientific American. Christie and I go way back to FiveThirtyEight together, I think she’s brilliant and one of the level best science writers out there, she’s responsible for some of my favorite journalism about the practice of science and when I heard she’s got a new five-episode podcast all about uncertainty, well, I just had to have her on. We spoke about humanity’s relationship with uncertainty, science as an ongoing process, and how not knowing can be as inspiring as it is frightening. Aschwanden can be found at Emerging Form and Scientific American. The podcast, Uncertain, is available wherever you get podcasts, and will be publishing every Wednesday over the next several weeks.

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