By Walt Hickey

Cassava

Farmers in Africa are using space imaging to check in on the status of their crops, tapping into imaging from California satellite provider EOS to monitor the state of fields. Last year the company launched EOS SAT-1, which is solely for agriculture and has fees on the order of $1.90 per hectare per year, which makes it ideal for smaller farms and priced reasonably well for developing countries. Over 242,000 people in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the U.S. and Europe use the crop monitoring platform, with 53,000 joining the service last year.

Orji Sunday, MIT Technology Review

Starface

Today’s youth are getting around blemishes and acne by putting stars on them, and also just putting stars on their skin because they look neat. Starface World Inc. makes the popular hydrocolloid pimple patches, which come in many colors and shapes, and they’ve become recurring fashion statements ever since Hailey Bieber first posted an Instagram selfie with stars on in 2020. The patches’ social media cachet have been huge for Starface, which is on track to bring in $90 million in revenue this year based on their 32-packs of Hydro-Stars that go for $14.99 a pop.

Miranda Jeyaretnam, Bloomberg

Puttin’ On The Ritz

The number of U.S. hotels with an average daily rate of $1,000 for a room hit 80 as of the first half of this year, up from just 22 such hotels in 2019. In Europe, the number of $1,000-a-night hotels tripled over the same period, to 183 establishments. While lots of people are trying to travel savvier, it turns out there are also plenty of people who don’t particularly care how much the room costs, and the upper end of the upper end in hospitality is doing just swell right now.

Dawn Gilbertson, The Wall Street Journal

Offline

China has seen all sorts of companies emerge trying to compete in the electric vehicle space, responding to high demand and new subsidies. The good news for them is, a whole lot of companies are succeeding and coming into secure and reliable production, such as BYD, which sold 340,799 vehicles in July 2024 alone, dominating the market. The bad news is, there are a whole lot of EV companies that are not succeeding, and one issue is that when they go bust, the long-term serviceability of the cars they have on the road comes into question. Since 2020, over 20 EV makers in China have shut down, including Singulato, Aiways, and most recently HiPhi, which sold 4,520 vehicles in 2022. The biggest bust was WM Motor, which sold 100,000 vehicles from 2019 to 2022 and has since gone insolvent.

Tianyu Fang, Rest of World

MrBeast

MrBeast remains the top YouTube personality, and by a lot: He’s got over 300 million subscribers, the most in the history of the platform, and in June alone gained 29 million subscribers. However, there’s uncertainty on the horizon, as a new crop of creators has learned from what he’s done and are somewhat successfully replicating his style at the exact moment that MrBeast himself is trying to jump over to streaming television, moving away from some of the hacks that made him especially popular on YouTube. The mini-Beasts are doing very, very well. The Stokes Twins have gained at least 8 million subscribers a month since March, and even outpaced MrBeast’s growth in April and May. Topper Guild, who has been riffing on Beast’s style since 2022, had the fifth-highest number of new subscribers in July on the whole platform, growing by 5 million. And A4, a channel operated by a Belarusian imitator who has been directly accused of ripping off thumbnails, grew by 7 million subscribers in July.

Ryan Broderick and Adam Bumas, Sherwood News

Out There

A new study published in Demography found that 99.5 percent of United States counties are home to at least one same-sex couple, up from 93 percent a decade ago, a trend fueled mostly by male same-sex couples moving out of big cities. Indeed, the paper also argued that gay neighborhoods in general are in decline, with the research finding that same-sex and different-sex households are more often in the same places, rather than in different parts of a city.

Erik Rolfsen, University of British Columbia

Permafrost

Earlier research had suggested that the thawing of permafrost might release lots of unsavory chemicals that had been otherwise locked in, with researchers fearing that a minimum of 40 kilograms of mercury and a maximum of 150 kilograms per square kilometer might get freed up as the ice melts. It turns out they were wrong — it’s way worse. A new study found that a minimum of 86 kilograms per square kilometer are getting released as the permafrost melts, with the new maximum observed coming in at 131 kilograms per square kilometer. Permafrost soil contains more mercury than all the rest of the soil on the planet combined, as well as all the oceans and atmosphere, too, so this is pretty bad.

Anita Hofshneider, High Country News

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