By Walt Hickey

Earth BioGenome

For the past six years, researchers have been working on a massive project to sequence the genomes of 1.67 million plants, animals, fungi and microbes, initially proposed as a $4.7 billion, 10-year project. It’s behind schedule and not quite there on funding, but it’s up to 3,000 genomes across 1,060 eukaryotic families, and on track to finish the first phase’s 10,000 species by 2026. The goal is to make the 1.67 million species target by 2032, and thanks to significantly lower costs of DNA sequencing now compared to the expectation, it’s gonna be way cheaper: Phase one was originally projected to cost $637 million but is now estimated to cost $265 million, or $26,500 per sequenced genome. The new projection has the cost per genome dropping to $6,100 for the 150,000 genomes of phase two, and $1,900 per genome for the 1.51 million of phase three.

Elizabeth Pennisi, Science

Amusement

Six Flags New Orleans closed in 2005 just ahead of Hurricane Katrina, and then never reopened again. For the past 19 years, the 227-acre amusement park — once known as Jazzland upon its opening in 2000 — has been vacant and deteriorating, long out of the care of the otherwise esteemed Six Flags corporation. On Monday, it was announced that the park will be demolished by its current owners, the development company Bayou Phoenix, and while it’s not certain exactly what’s next for the doomed amusement park in the swamps of Louisiana that was killed by a hurricane, I can personally guarantee it will be extremely haunted.

Blake Taylor, Attractions Magazine

Architects

Researchers studied 400 structures built by 43 different groups of white-browed sparrow-weavers, birds that live communally and build nests as a large group in the Kalahari Desert. What’s cool about birds is that large communities of them tend to develop unique and consistent behaviors that persist across generations, a pattern termed an animal culture. Turns out that different communities of sparrow-weavers have different ways of building nests, including how long or short the structures are and how wide the tubes are. Those unique architectural styles persist across generations, and when outsiders join, they adapt to the styles, too.

Gennaro Tomma, Scientific American

Drones

One of the most consequential weapons of the Ukraine war has been quick, remote-controlled aircraft called first-person-view drones, or FPVs. They’re 7 to 10 inches in diameter, have a range of about 12 miles, are controlled by a pilot remotely and can carry explosives weighing up to 9 pounds that detonate when the drone crashes into a target. There’s another version developed by the Ukrainians that can be armed with four 9-pound bombs to be dropped from the air. To give a sense of how novel this is and what it means for the future of armed conflict, Ukraine is currently cranking out thousands of these per month at a cost of about $500 a pop, and the aces of this aerial war are some of the deadliest in any conflict.

James Marson, The Wall Street Journal

Sake

Exports of sake, the Japanese liquor, are up 70 percent over the past three years. While demand for sake has declined domestically in Japan since peaking in the 1970s, exports abroad hit 41.1 billion yen ($270.4 million) last year, with the U.S. being the largest destination, importing 6,500 kiloliters of sake. That’s also interesting because sake is still a drop in the bucket in the United States alcohol business, accounting for just 0.2 percent of the market as of 2020.

Sayaka Saito and Sara Mori, Nikkei Asia

Forest

New research suggests that globally, 215 million hectares of land could be reforested if we just leave it alone, meaning that the world would regain forests covering a landmass the size of Mexico if we merely stopped cutting it down or farming and ranching on it. While it’s not possible that all deforested land will just grow back of its own volition, the study suggests that a whole lot of deforested land is in excellent condition to repair itself, especially cleared land adjacent to forests — particularly in 98 million hectares in the Neotropics of South and Central America, 90 million hectares in the Indomalayan tropics of Southeast Asia, and 25.5 million hectares in Africa. It’s way cheaper: Natural reforestation costs between $12 and $3,880 per hectare, while active regeneration costs between $105 and $25,830 per acre.

Brooke Williams and Robin Chazdon, The Conversation

Mars

A new analysis published in Geophysical Research Letters put forward an idea of why the soil on Mars is so crusty. In 2018, NASA’s InSight lander tried to drill five meters down into the Martian surface, but only managed to get just underneath the surface before getting stuck. Even still, it was able to gather lots of data on daily temperature fluctuations on Mars in the top 40 centimeters of Mars’ surface. From there it could estimate that the top 30 centimeters of soil is essentially basaltic sand, and just beneath that you’re talking consolidated sand and coarse basalt fragments. The theory about the crustiness is that the temperature fluctuations measured means that salty brines can form about 10 hours a day, and when it solidifies it becomes that tough duricrust under the surface.

Matt Williams, Universe Today

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