By Walt Hickey

Super Bowl

Fox has the Super Bowl this year and is reporting very strong interest in the ad business, with the company announcing it’s auctioned off the last of the remaining inventory of commercials already. The spots have been going for rates above $7 million for a 30-second spot, which is well above the $6.5 million per 30 seconds Fox landed two years ago for Eagles-Chiefs game. That year, the last ad slot wasn’t even sold until the Monday before the game, meaning that selling out before November indicates solid demand this time around.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Vapes

One-time, single-use vapes contain rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that are never actually recharged and just go to the dump. One tinkerer gathered 130 disposable vapes from a music festival’s trash, extracted the model 20400 battery cells, and converted them into a battery bank that served as a 48-volt, 1,500-watt power source for an e-bike. To be clear, this is remarkably dangerous, but as with many dangerous things one must look around furtively and when the coast is clear of foolhardy minds, concede it’s extremely rad. Upon testing the ensuing contraption, Chris Doel managed to get 20.5 miles (33 kilometers) on a vape-powered bicycle essentially without peddling. Given that most of the battery cells are rated for 300 charging cycles but only used for one vape, the estimated 11.9 million disposable vapes sold monthly as of March 2023 are a pretty impressive waste of battery material, amounting to 23.6 tons of lithium wasted in disposed vapes per year.

Kevin Purdy, Ars Technica

Travelator

In many airports you might find those neat moving walkways, which tend to be built out of interlocking steel plates not unlike a horizontal escalator. Those are cool, but their antecedent — the travelator — is even cooler, even if it’s a dying breed. Travelators are essentially moving walkways, but instead of steel plates it’s just one gigantic strip of rubber, first appearing in 1893 but becoming popular in the 1950s, only to be replaced recently by the newer moving walkways. The travelators are deeply fun and somewhat bouncy, but a massive pain to maintain, as damage can only be fixed by replacing the whole band rather than swapping out one steel plate. Also, there’s apparently only one company that still makes the bands, and they have a massive order book queue. Their future can be seen in San Francisco, where as a result of a $2.6 billion modernization plan, the three remaining 30-plus-year-old travelator walkways in SFO’s Terminal 3 will be ripped out and replaced with the new ones.

Jim Carlton, The Wall Street Journal

Terra-Cotta

A new analysis published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology looked at 60 terra-cotta figurines found at an archeological site in the ancient port city of Thonis-Heracleion in Egypt to try to learn who made them. The human figurines are made out of clay, and what’s especially interesting is that nine of them had clearly preserved fingerprints, which were subsequently used by the researchers to test the prevailing theory — that the figurine-makers were men of lower status — which held because the word for the profession was koroplathos, which has a masculine ending. Female fingerprints tended to have more densely packed ridges than male prints, and children’s fingerprints tended to have thinner ridges than adults. Based on this, we can conclude that there were 14 different people who worked on the nine dolls, that both men and women did it, and also that there was a ton of child labor involved, mostly in the delicate work of pressing clay sheets into molds.

Sandee Oster, Phys.org

Returns

Last year consumers in the United States returned $743 billion worth of merchandise, which was 14.5 percent of all the things they bought. That’s up, an increase from 10.6 percent in 2020 according to the National Retail Federation. Given that there are costs to a business of returning an unwanted good — including shipping, sorting, warehousing, and then all the work of selling off the returned product to a discount wholesaler or the trash — based on the type of good that people are trying to return, some retailers are occasionally just refunding them and instructing the customer to dispose of the item as they see fit. Calibrating when to give a refund, when to insist on a return, and when a customer might be abusing the system is now a new area of consternation and financial modeling for retailers.

Haleluya Hadero, The Associated Press

No, More Bets

The House is losing a bit more than usual, even if it is still generally and overwhelmingly winning, as gambling revenue for the Vegas Strip dropped for the third consecutive month in September, slipping 1.8 percent. Hilariously, it’s entirely because of baccarat, a high-stakes game that has much better odds for players than other casino games like roulette, craps, blackjack and especially the one-armed bandits. Ignoring baccarat, gambling revenue was up 7.6 percent on the Strip. That said, Vegas got hosed in September on baccarat: Betting was down 22 percent in general, and the amount of money they actually made from the game was down 40 percent because so many of the guests that did play beat them on the table.

Rob Golum, Bloomberg

Black Hole

Supermassive black holes are a bit of a cosmological question, given that there’s generally understood to be a maximum amount of stuff that a black hole can consume at a time, the Eddington Limit, where radiation pressure will push away as much matter as the black hole will pull in. To exceed it, matter has to essentially fall directly into a black hole. Supermassive black holes are cool because in order to get as big as they are, they basically have to pull down a lot of matter. A black hole called LID-568 spotted by the Chandra X-ray Telescope is a new, fascinating piece of this puzzle, as it’s feeding at what should be 40 times that theoretical limit, and has been doing so for millions of years. If that’s possible, the manner in which supermassive black holes can form becomes a little more obvious.

John Timmer, Ars Technica

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