By Walt Hickey

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Toys

Overall, the U.S. toy market has been relatively flat, with sales down a modest 0.4 percent through he first half of the year, hitting $11.2 billion. That said, within the business things are moving very quickly: LEGO fueled 25 percent growth in building sets, while at the same time action figures are down 12 percent, dolls are down 9 percent, and games and puzzles are down 5 percent. In general, vehicles are up 1 percent, and youth electronics are down 11 percent.

Toy Book

Check

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, as of October 2023 the average American wrote 1.23 checks in that month. The average amount of money that check was worth was $504, indicating that in general people were cutting checks for top-dollar purchases. By comparison, in 2000, the average American wrote 60 checks per year. In October 2023, that same month, among Americans who used cash, the average American used cash in 7.3 transactions, which averaged at $44.11 in amount.

Adam Chandler, Sherwood News

Boulders

Seismologists love precariously balanced rocks, better known as PBRs. These are massive boulders that are presently balanced on rocks, and which can be used to figure out the frequency of earthquakes that would otherwise disturb them. Five such precariously balanced rocks were found in New York and Vermont, and were subsequently used to confirm the frequency of magnitude 6.5 to 7.0 quakes in the northern Adirondacks.

Seismological Society of America

Tungsten Arm

Shohei Ohtani, a player that happens after you take a hundred years of baseball and boil that until naught remains but a single man, is on the edge of a class of MLB player that until now never existed. There exists a club of five players, the 40-40 club, of players who have hit 40 home runs and stolen 40 bases in a season. Ohtani will soon, if all goes well, forge a new club, the 50-50 club. As of Tuesday, he’s got 46 home runs and 47 stolen bases.

Lindsey Adler, The Wall Street Journal

Voyager 1

After 47 years, the Voyager 1 space probe has figured out a way to continue on its way. It’s got three branches of hydrazine thrusters that help it point to Earth. The liquid hydrazine thrusters that allow the spacecraft to keep pointed towards Earth can get clogged, as first noticed in 2002. Ever since then, they’ve moved from thruster to thruster. Since then, the team moved to the second branch, and then to the third branch of maneuver thrusters. Now, that third branch of thrusters is more clogged than the first branch, and the latest news is that the team has successfully made the shift. The width of the clogged tubes is in a bad way: the original tube opening of 0.25 millimeters is down to 0.035 millimeters.

NASA

Roads

A new study found that the cost of road construction in the United States is heavily affected by how much competition there is among contractors who work on streets. In general, a standard deviation increase in employment per capita for the Department of Transportation led to 16 percent declines in costs, with one additional bidder linked to an 8.3 percent decline in costs for road projects, or a savings of $30,000 per lane-mile, or an average of $460,000 per project.

Pat Garofalo, Boondoggle

Minerals

In 2023 alone, 8.5 billion metric tons of coal was extracted from the ground. The reality is, as the planet’s extraction industries move away from carbon and careen toward metals, from 2022 to 2050 the aggregate amount of extraction necessary of metals will only come in around 7 billion metric tons, in total. Of that, 5 billion tons will go to steel, but 950 million tons will be extracted aluminum, 650 million tons copper, 170 million tons graphite, 100 million tons nickel, and so on. The main thing is: the energy spent in 2023 dragging coal out of the supple crust of Earth, that aggregate energy, it’s soon to be surpassed by somethings much more convenient.

Akshat Rathi, Bloomberg

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