By Walt Hickey

Dwayne “The Pacifist” Johnson

The Army is trying to deal with a sponsorship deal gone awry related to an $11 million marketing deal the Pentagon cut with the United Football League and its proprietor, the multihyphenate and actor Dwayne Johnson. One part of the deal was that Johnson would tout the Army in five social media posts — posts to 396 million followers the military valued at $1 million a pop — but only ended up posting two of them, according to the Army. The Army branding during UFL games was, according to internal Pentagon emails, an utter flop, and internal projections against where the UFL resources could have otherwise been spent actually led recruiters to estimate that the arrangement led to a projected loss of 38 enlistments. Why exactly military brass thought the best place to reach Gen Z was on network television is beyond the scope of the fiasco, but it numbers up there with the notorious $88 million National Guard NASCAR sponsorship that infamously did not lead to a single added enlistment, per Pentagon estimates.

Steve Beynon, Military.com

Aces Wild

The WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces have caught flack from the league as a whole over a name, image and licensing deal between the players on that team and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which pays them $100,000 annually on the condition the players participate in at least three public announcements per year. Other teams have cried foul, arguing that the city giving all the players an extra $100,000 is just an attempt to subvert the salary cap and give Vegas a better bargaining chip with player recruitment. Copies of the contracts now show that in the event that provisions are inconsistent with the collective bargaining agreement or their player contracts, the sponsorship provisions are in no effect, a bit of a workaround that could clear the situation up.

Daniel Libit and Eben Novy-Williams, Sportico

Solarpunk

AES Corporation has revealed a robot called Maximo that installs thousands of heavy solar panels autonomously, and which will enter service in the desert of California after a successful testing period. The robot — which can work 24 hours and install 80-pound panels in the kind of scorching weather that is hard for humans but ideal for solar farms — uses suction cups to lift the panels ahead of installation, and can better endure difficult terrain than previous experiments. So far AES has installed 10 megawatts of solar panels with robots, and is aiming for 100 megawatts of robot-installed solar power by 2025. It takes 12 to 18 months to install a large solar farm, and the hope is this cuts that substantially.

Brad Plumer, The New York Times

Lunch Fees

A new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has found that processing fees instituted by electronic school lunch accounts are costing American parents $100 million per year. According to the CFPB, the fees averaged out to $2.37 for flat fees and 4.4 percent when they were levied as a percentage of transactions. This can particularly impact low-income families, and can vastly increase the cost of lunch. There are about 20 companies that handle lunch payment processing, with three of them — MySchoolBucks ($2.55 average flat fee and 4.5 percent average percentage fee), SchoolCafé ($2.38 and 4.58 percent) and LINQ Connect ($2.13 and 3.5 percent) — covering two-thirds of students. Only 21 percent of sampled school districts explicitly disclosed the fees.

Pat Garofalo, Boondoggle

Trash

The U.S. Air Force monitors 25,000 pieces of trash in low-Earth orbit, but current technology limits the size of the smallest possible trackable piece of debris to 10 centimeters across. That’s pretty remarkable, but it’s also nowhere near good enough to track all the little bits of debris that has accumulated in orbit, especially given the reality that in order for it to stay in orbit it’s got to be traveling at 10 kilometers per second. The effects are gnarly: In 2016 a millimeter-sized piece of debris hit a panel of a European Space Agency satellite and left a 40-centimeter hole in the panel. It gets worse all the time; a decommissioned Russian satellite broke into over 100 fragments a few weeks ago, adding even more unknown debris to the orbit. The issue has prompted the Space Debris Identification and Tracking program (SINTRA) to identify ultrasmall pieces of space junk, an aptly named program if you have any plans to Fly Me To The Moon.

Sharmila Kuthunur, Scientific American

Army of the Deep

Researchers at the Florida Aquarium and the University of Florida are attempting to breed an army of urchins to save coral reefs in the Caribbean. For every million embryos conceived, 100,000 become larvae, and of those 100,000 larvae only around 2,000 make it to adulthood. The number of urchins a given community has can have considerable impacts on the ecosystem — California’s been trying to kill off the legions of urchins off their coast that devour kelp forests in the absence of starfish predators — but in the Caribbean they’re sorely needed to feed on the massive amount of accumulating algae that’s smothering reefs and preventing coral from affixing to rocks. In the 1980s, a disease wiped out 97 percent of Diadema urchins in the Carribbean, and a later outbreak struck to level them further. Now, scientists are trying to rejuvenate them.

Lisa S. Gardiner, Hakai Magazine

Leads

The lead generation business is an obscure but incredibly lucrative one, which sucks up consumer data and hawks potential customers to insurance companies, mortgages, credit card offerings and more. These are highly valuable businesses that operate in a legal gray area when it comes to phone and text solicitations and spam messages. One of the largest companies in the game was sued in 2023 for collecting and selling 1 million leads a day by creating thousands of fake websites offering free services, and selling the data — more than 620 million leads in less than two years — to hundreds of partners. The good news is, a new FCC rule requiring companies to get the specific consent of a consumer they market to rather than just laundering that consent through a third-party lead generator is poised to potentially be an extinction-level event for the obscure industry.

Colin Sholes, Sherwood News

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