By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

ZiG

Zimbabwe, once the poster child for hyperinflation, is having another go at its own currency, the ZiG, which is short for Zimbabwe Gold. It is Zimbabwe’s sixth attempt at establishing its own currency since 2008, when its inflation was 500 billion percent. The new currency is backed by 2,522 kilograms of gold and $100 million in foreign currency reserves, and is a departure from the Zimbabwean dollar revived in 2019 after a decade on foreign currency. As of April, that dollar was down 80 percent, and U.S. dollars were responsible for four-fifths of transactions. The ZiG began trading on April 8 at an exchange rate of 13.56 ZiG to 1 USD, and it’s working so far: Transactions in USD are down from 85 percent of transactions to 70 percent since.

Alister Bull and Ray Ndlovu, Bloomberg

Buddies

The Gaia spacecraft from the European Space Agency has identified 352 asteroids in the solar system that likely have a little orbiting moonlet of their own, systems of binary asteroids that tend to be small and hard to spot. The moonlet asteroids were not necessarily spotted, but rather intuited based on positions and movements of the celestial bodies. A team of scientists searched through the movements of 150,000 tracked asteroids and identified any that wobbled a bit, which implied the presence of something else in the vicinity messing with the orbit. Perhaps in the future astronomers will look back on our descriptions of these asteroids — as “longtime companions” or “a known wobbler with a devoted valet” or “inseparable friends who shared an orbit with each other for most of their lifetimes” — and laugh that we merely imply a relationship between the pair as a custom of the mere tools of our era.

Kate Graham-Shaw, Scientific American

It Ends With Us

This weekend, the film adaptation of the book sensation It Ends With Us hits cinemas, the first of the works of star author Colleen Hoover to make it to the big screen. Hoover has moved an eye-popping 28.9 million books in print and another 7 million e-books, and It Ends With Us is the most popular of the stack, with 6.9 million copies sold. Her books are mainstays of the bestseller list — in 2022, she had six of the top 10 slots at once — and It Ends With Us has been on the list for 131 weeks, currently listed at the top.

Constance Grady, Vox

Mantle

The first analysis of a large sample of rocks pulled from Earth’s mantle has been released, the result of an effort to pull a core of rock from the level beneath the crust we all live on. On continents, the mantle is 30 kilometers down, but in the ocean it’s only 7 kilometers deep, and while efforts to drill through the seabed to get fresh mantle rocks have been somewhat notoriously ill-fated, last year researchers got an intact core of mantle rocks from a part of the seafloor where the crust is thin. The extracted core is 1,268 meters long, beating out the previous record holder for longest core of mantle extracted by over a kilometer. Some of the samples have been affected by the seawater, which converted olivine to serpentine, and some of the cores are completely serpentinized, but other parts of the sample are as little as 40 percent altered.

Maya Wei-Haas, Science

PKZILLA

A study has found the new largest protein, which the researchers named PKZILLA-1. It was found in an algae that produces toxins that kill fish, and the thing is huge, in a manner of speaking. It’s 25 percent larger than titin, which was previously thought to be the largest protein, found in human muscles and able to get to a length of 1 whole micron. The PKZILLA-1 protein and another big guy, PKZILLA-2, produce prymnesin, which is a complex, toxic molecule. Titin is 3.7 megadaltons in mass, roughly 90 times the size of a typical protein, while PKZILLA-1 is 4.7 megadaltons and PKZILLA-2 is 3.2 megadaltons.

University of California-San Diego

Flying

The fatality rate when flying is down to 1 per every 13.7 million passenger boardings from 2018 to 2022, which is a considerable improvement from the 1 per 7.9 million passenger boardings from 2008 to 2017. Aviation safety has been improving massively over the past several decades: From 1968 to 1977, that figure was 1 per every 350,000 boardings, from 1978 to 1987 it was 1 per 750,000 boardings, from 1988 to 1997 it was 1 per 1.3 million, and from 1998 to 2007 it was 1 per 2.7 million. The numbers paint a comforting picture of safety in the skies. I suppose I’d like to thank the Boeing Corporation for their recent hard work in making the experience of flying still feel like a real risky maneuver and their dedication to reminding us of the days when flying had some real risk and required guile and daring. Thanks for keeping the romance alive.

Agence France-Presse

Hurricanes

After a slow start, this hurricane season is still projected to be higher than average. Initial predictions back in May put the number of expected named storms at between 17 and 25. In NOAA’s latest update, that figure was revised only slightly to between 17 and 24 named storms. Of those, eight to 13 are projected to become hurricanes, with four to seven of them being major hurricanes with at least 111 mph winds. The average season produces 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes from June 1 to November 30. Right now, we’re up to Debby, and Debby is up to the Carolinas.

Associated Press

We’ve had a great run lately in the Sunday edition!

Last week, we had a podcast episode with the brilliant Julia Alexander, author of the new blog Posting Nexus. She’s been one of the most insightful and compelling minds on attention — where we allocate it, how we measure that, and what becomes of that — for several years now. Alexander can be found at Posting Nexus, and you can follow the occasional Numlock Podcast on Apple and Spotify and wherever else you listen.

Last Sunday, I spoke to Cecilia D’Anastasio, who wrote “Are You Playing a Person or a Bot for Cash Gaming Prizes?” for Bloomberg. This story gets into all sorts of prominant moves in the business of mobile gaming, including app-store competition, huge amounts of user money involved, the development of prizes and jackpots for winning, and more. D’Anastasio can be found at Bloomberg.

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