By Walt Hickey

Mt. Fuji

Japan continues to ride out what locals consider to be overtourism, and has been implementing new strategies to limit the numbers who can visit certain attractive areas. The iconic Mt. Fuji opened to climbers on Monday with a 2,000-yen ($12) toll on the Yoshida trail and a cap of 4,000 climbers per day. Roughly 1,700 climbers passed through the gate on that first day of tolled operation. The summit, at 3,776 meters, still carries the risk of hypothermia and altitude sickness, and concerns over too many people attempting a summit, overwhelming the ability to respond to an emergency, are top of mind. The 4,000 cap should not pose too significant of a problem most of the time, as in 2019, there were only 10 days where the number of climbers exceeded that, maxing out at 6,420.

Takayuki Matsunaga and Taro Saeki, Nikkei Asia

EMTs

New York City’s ambulance response times have hit a high not seen since the peak of the pandemic, with emergency medical services averaging 12.81 minutes to respond to life-threatening emergencies and 28.31 minutes to respond to non-life-threatening emergencies. That’s up 69 seconds compared to two years ago, and has steadily ticked up. The reasons are multiple — there are record numbers of cars on the road and the governor scuttled a policy that would have fixed that, and calls are up — but one key reason for this is a shortage of ambulance drivers thanks to the abysmal pay offered. Compensation starts at $39,386, which is below that of an app worker making the new city minimum of $19.56 per hour.

Matt Katz, Gothamist

Arctic

A radio station in China has begun broadcasting weather of Arctic sea ice conditions off the coast of Russia, and will publish bulletins twice a day from July 1 to October 31. As sea ice recedes, shipping goods from China to Europe over the Northern Sea Route becomes feasible during longer and longer periods of this year. The 13,000-kilometer route from Murmansk to the Bering Strait through the Arctic Ocean is a vastly shorter leg than the 21,000-kilometer trek from Asia to Europe by way of the Suez Canal.

Reuters

Hadron Collider

The ATLAS Experiment at CERN is publishing 65 terabytes of data to the public representing 7 billion collision events carried out by the Large Hadron Collider, as well as data from 2 billion simulations. This is all the data collected from the 2015-2016 proton-proton operation of the collider. The next data that will be released en masse for anyone to sift through will be lead-lead-nuclei collision data. So, if you wanted to see some atom smashing but lack the funds or space for a 27-kilometer ring, now’s your chance to snap up some solid particle dust for free.

Katarina Anthony, ATLAS Experiment

Fried Chicken

As the Chicken Sandwich Wars carry on with little hope of peace in sight, it’s possible to see just how significant this conflagration has become for the fast-casual and quick-service industry. Indeed, fried chicken sandwiches have achieved a degree of popularity on restaurant menus around the country once not even dreamed of. Indeed, fried chicken sandwiches appear on 47 percent of restaurant menus now; for perspective, burgers only appear on 41 percent of menus. For chicken sandwiches, that number jumped 10 percent from 2020 to 2021. While burgers may still be more popular overall than chicken sandwiches, the menus don’t lie, and an ancillary sandwich is now firmly center stage.

Deena Shanker, Bloomberg

Hydropower

Hydropower is a massive source of renewable energy, but it’s rough for fish. Concerns over how dams affect migration of fish have persistently cropped up, and as hydropower facilities come up for relicensing — as 17 gigawatts’ worth of hydropower will by 2035 — new companies are trying to design turbines that don’t also accidentally serve as fish blenders. A typical turbine blade might move at a rate of 30 meters per second, which needless to say is not a great situation for adjacent wildlife. A new turbine design from a company called Natel Energy makes the blades way more survivable, with a study of American eels finding that 99 percent survived after passing through the equipment, compared to previous studies that put eel survival rate at 40 percent after passing through a hydropower plant’s turbine.

Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review

Hurricanes

The field of paleotempestology — which attempts to use geological and geospatial information to determine the history of storms in a region — really kicked into gear following Hurricane Andrew in 1992, as reinsurers invested money into prehistoric hurricane research. To predict how hurricanes will act in the future, we’re only able to look at 170 years’ worth of instrumental data, so the prospect of being able to learn more about thousands of years of weather by radiocarbon dating waves of sand in lakes near the coastline is pretty attractive research these days. Sediment cores from the Gulf Coast show an intense period of hurricane activity for centuries that ended abruptly 600 to 800 years ago.

Dino Grandoni, The Washington Post

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