By Walt Hickey

Sri Lanka

Tourism to Sri Lanka has nosedived over the past several years, largely because of the ramifications of a terror attack in 2019 and the economic and political turmoil that hit the country two years ago. Things are finally bouncing back, and visitors are returning to the country; the Central Bank of Sri Lanka reported that earnings from tourism hit $1.5 billion in the first half of the year, up 78 percent year over year, with 1.01 million arrivals. That’s well ahead of last year, as the tourism sector generated $2 billion in 2023, and on the way to hitting the peak of arrivals in 2018, when the country welcomed 2.5 million tourists who spent $4.4 billion in the country.

Peden Doma Bhutia, Skift

Horizon

Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 2 has been delayed from its scheduled August 16 release after the first film in the series from auteur Kevin Costner bombed at the box office, opening to $11 million on a $100 million budget. The decision to scrap the release plans of the sequel signal that the producers and distributors want to get Horizon onto streaming or premium video on demand, and then gauge from there how best to find an audience for a film that can be most charitably described as “sprawling,” “ambitious,” and “I am not sure if most if not all of the lead and supporting characters actually had names.”

Katcy Stephan, Variety

Cooking Oil

An undercover report from Beijing News has sent shock waves through China, with an allegation that the trucks that ship cooking oil and syrup are also used for fuel and chemicals and are not adequately cleaned in between uses. Officials from the State Council’s food safety commission are investigating, and already the leading cooking oil supplier in the country, Yihai Kerry, saw its shares drop 8 percent at one point during trading, hitting a record low. It’s not the first time this kind of scandal has happened: Fuel tankers have been caught transporting cooking oil in 2005, 2011 and 2015, and a 2008 baby formula scandal roiled public trust in the food system.

Cissy Zhou, Nikkei Asia

Lineup

A new study showed 350 people a photograph of a “guilty” suspect, and then researchers asked them to identify the suspect out of a photographic lineup, half of which contained the suspect while the other half didn’t. Also, sometimes the guilty person had a haircut, or shaved their stubble, or wore different clothes. In those situations, participants were 50 percent less likely to identify the suspect, even if they were in front of them in mildly changed clothing. Anyway, everyone who argues that it’s not believable that Clark Kent’s friends could be fooled about him being Superman is clearly wrong.

Dominic T. Jordan, Adrian J. Scott and Donald Thomson, The Conversation

Midsized Black Hole

Astronomers have reported that, after monitoring a cluster of stars for 20 years, they believe they’ve found a system that is in the gravitational field of an object with the mass of 8,200 suns, which would be a black hole of especially interesting proportions. See, there’s lots of evidence for supermassive black holes with the mass of millions or billions of suns (like at the center of a galaxy), as well as a lot of obvious smaller black holes which weigh on the order of 10 or so suns, which occur when large stars collapse. It’s that middle area that’s been sticky, but a new study reports to have found one in the globular cluster Omega Centauri, based on 500 images of the fast-moving stars taken over 20 years. While the moves were slight on paper — the fastest star moved two pixels in two decades — that’s still 113 kilometers a second, which is evidence it’s orbiting something the size of 8,200 suns. That also makes Omega Centauri the smallest known system of stars orbiting a black hole, as well as the closest black hole to Earth, at 18,000 light-years away.

Daniel Clery, Science

Rebuild

FEMA has a $3 billion annual spend on disaster recovery, and a frustration has been that rebuilding often means rebuilding on the exact spot where a building was particularly vulnerable to flooding. FEMA has long defined a “floodplain” as a place that has a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year, but now will expand that definition to factor in the impacts of climate change on the future flood risk of an area. That would necessitate rebuilding things elevated above that floodplain in the future and cutting the odds they get submerged again. That’s pricier in the short term — the cost of elevating and flood-proofing structures could add $150 million in costs over the next decade, because a 2-foot increase of elevation would increase costs by 2 percent — but that would pay for itself over the next 60 years by avoiding future damage.

Jake Bittle, Grist

Moon Time

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has produced the best-ever estimate of how much faster time passes on the moon, given that the general theory of relativity means time moves faster or slower depending on the gravity situation, and to some notoriety, the moon’s got less of it. Time on the moon moves 0.0000575 seconds faster per day, or 57.50 µs/d, than it does on Earth. It’s one important step on the way to developing a formalized system of moon time.

Bob Yirka, Phys.org

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