By Walt Hickey

Tickets

Pretty much all tickets are digital-first now, and while it’s certainly possible to print off a ticket in some circumstances, realistically the age of having a physical ticket is over. While that may be a bit more convenient, it has the unfortunate side effect of eliminating the one small permanent, physical manifestation of attendance at an ephemeral event that might have been held as a small keepsake or memento. The 126-year-old printing company Weldon, Williams and Lick printed tickets for the Olympics, Super Bowls and World Cups, but has had their own ticket-printing business stymied by the demise of physical tickets, with revenue dropping 67 percent from 2019 to 2021. They have begun to make deals with event planners — such as the MLB for their Midsummer Classic — to produce commemorative souvenir tickets at the price of $25 each, and now those represent 10 percent of the company’s business, growing 50 percent year over year.

Jacob Feldman, Sportico

Flavour Blaster

If you’ve paid more then fifteen dollars for a cocktail at any point in the past couple years, you might be familiar with a recent phenomenon where a beverage is served with an ingredient of smoke, perhaps accomplished with an upside-down glass with a burning piece of wood in it, or a big bubble on top of the drink filled with billowing smoke. It looks great on Instagram and it’s a great way to add ten bucks to the price of a cocktail for the same experience as having a guy vape in your general direction. But where on earth did it come from? The device behind it is the Flavour Blaster, a $500 machine filled with any one of 20 different scents that puts a bubble full of the fog on top of a beverage. It launched in 2018 to thousands of advanced orders, and the company behind it has a full R&D team creating projects for liquor brands to the tune of $15 million to $18 million a year. While first it started at premium cocktail bars in major cities, now Outback Steakhouse, Royal Caribbean and P.F. Changs are large customers.

Aaron Goldfarb, Vinepair

Arctic

The Eduard Toll, a liquefied natural-gas carrier, has completed an early-season voyage from Yamal in northern Russia to Xiuyu, China, in 18 days, kicking off the Arctic summer shipping season, which is a fun and not at all terrifying “feature” of a rapidly warming world. The vessel managed to complete most of the route unassisted but did need the nuclear icebreaker Sibir to escort it through a little bit of thicker ice. Two LNG carriers followed, and a fourth and fifth tanker are now en route. The voyage going in the other direction, around Northern Europe and the southern tip of Africa, takes at least six weeks. There were 31 permits for LNG carriers to take the Arctic route as of July 15, and with every successful delivery of future carbon dioxide, they guarantee the summer gets a little bit longer in the future.

Malte Humpert, gCaptain

The Gallium Anomaly

Decades ago, Soviet and American physicists working deep beneath a mountain at Baksan Neutrino Observatory tried to figure out why there are fewer electron neutrinos coming from the sun than expected. To do this, they had a tank of 57 metric tons of gallium — the metal that is liquid at room temperature — and they monitored how often an incoming neutrino would combine with a gallium atom to form the element germanium. After a month, they counted the amount of germanium produced. In the process, they discovered that there was 20 percent less germanium than expected, a phenomenon that was called the Gallium Anomaly. Follow-ups have continued to prove that out: In 2022, one chamber had 79 percent of the expected amount of germanium, and another had 77 percent. Repeated attempts to identify the issue have turned up nothing, which is why they’re considering the controversial possibility of a so-called “sterile neutrino.”

Jonathan O’Callaghan, Quanta Magazine

Music

The streaming data is in for the first half of the year, and Luminate is reporting that global streaming was up 15.1 percent in the first six months, with 2.29 trillion on-demand audio streams. From a genre perspective, the big winner was Latin music, which saw its share of streaming up 0.51 percentage points compared to the same period last year, followed by pop (0.25 percentage points), rock (0.21 percentage points) and country (0.14 percentage points). There was one big loser, as R&B and hip-hop shed 1.81 percentage points of market share compared to the first six months of last year.

Maria Sherman, The Associated Press

Movies

A new forecast from PwC projects that global box office revenue in 2026 will beat the pre-pandemic levels, even though overall admissions are not projected to beat pre-pandemic levels in the next five years. The report projects that box office revenues will hit $37.68 billion in 2025 and $40.23 billion in 2026, at which point they’ll pass the $38.55 billion notched in 2019. That’ll happen because of rising prices; the 7.92 billion admissions to cinemas globally in 2019 (1.3 billion in North America) are not expected to be repeated any time soon, with admissions projected to hit just 6.45 billion in 2028, 953 million of them in North America.

Georg Szalai, The Hollywood Reporter

New Madrid

Most earthquake risk in the U.S. is assessed on the West Coast, in Alaska, and to a lesser extent in the Mountain West, but there’s a hot spot of mild concern smack dab in the middle of the country. In 1811, New Madrid in what is now Missouri was rocked by a massive earthquake, one that changed the level of the land by 15 feet. Geologists believe that the New Madrid Seismic Zone has seen a 7.0 or higher earthquake every 500 years for the past 5,000 years. Now, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the New Madrid region has a 25 percent to 40 percent chance of a magnitude 6.0 or higher earthquake in the next 50 years, and a 10 percent chance it’s 7.0 or higher. The problem is, today the area is home to millions of people across five states, including the generally unprepared major cities of Memphis and St. Louis, and a major earthquake in the area would cost an average of $10 billion a year for 100 years. Given the findings, the cities are beginning to retrofit bridges.

Freda Kreier, Undark

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