By Walt Hickey

Ghost Plates

Toll evasion by drivers coming through New York City has spiked 12.6 percent in the first several months of the year, with January through April averaging 398,975 missed toll transactions per month due to people obscuring license plates. The whole scam costs the MTA $50 million per year. The number of unbillable toll transactions specifically due to a fake or unreadable plate has been consistently 80,000 per month, while the number due to obstructed license plates has risen to 155,000 per month, with most of the balance coming from unregistered or temporary plates.

Alfonso A. Castillo, Newsday

Quagga

A long-running research project has sought to revive the quagga, a zebra-like animal that went extinct in 1883. It was one of the first extinct animals to get its DNA sequenced all the way back in the 1980s, and since 1987 The Quagga Project has attempted to breed the quagga back by way of selective zebra breeding. The result is an animal that bears a mild resemblance to the extinct quagga, but detractors point out that let’s be real here: You’ve mostly spent the past four decades making a quagga-esque zebra, but that ain’t a quagga. The project claims that of the 150 animals it now owns, about 10 percent might blend in with a hypothetical herd of quaggas. Next year, the genome of the re-bred quaggas will be sequenced, which will one way or another put a button on this quixotic but nevertheless compelling project.

Alexandra Wexler, The Wall Street Journal

Vintage

Penn State is suing Vintage Brand, which is an online retailer that sells vintage-style sports memorabilia. At the heart of the case is what kind of imagery a retailer can reasonably take from a team’s history without the consent of the team itself, and it’s poised to have reverberations around the entire industry adjacent to sports, whether they’re hawking team photos, team-inspired merch or throwback gear. Penn State says that Vintage is a serial infringer of its brand, while Vintage counters that reproducing historic artistic images from vintage memorabilia — not anything from the more familiar design — is okay given the ornamental and aesthetically functional use. From 2018 to 2021, Vintage sold products with 35 Penn State-related vintage images, all predating 1989, and earned less than $25,000 in revenue.

Michael McCann, Sportico

Love Songs

By some metrics, we’re in a declining age of love songs. Of the 5,100 Billboard Top 10 hits from 1958 to 2023, 1,040 of them could be called “serenades,” or songs about love and devotion sung from one person to another. These are indeed in decline, going from 23 percent of hits in the 1960s and up to 27 percent in the 1990s to a sharp drop to 12 percent of hits in our current era. It’s less that love songs overall are in decline, but rather that they’re changing in nature. A similar decline is seen in songs about heartache (15 percent of hits today, down from 22 percent in the ’60s and 20 percent in the ’90s), but songs about other, more ambiguous kinds of love — complicated love, sexually confident songs, love songs about the self, songs about pursuit — have gone from 18 percent of hits in the ’60s to 42 percent of hits today. By that metric, once you consider the whole ecosystem, the rate of love songs is flat.

David Mora and Michelle Jia, The Pudding

Kawasaki

Kawasaki Heavy Industries sold a 20 percent stake in its Kawasaki Motors business to an investment house as part of a plan to really focus on the American market. The Japanese company makes motorcycles, ATVs and other leisure and agricultural vehicles, but most of those are going to the United States, which accounted for 56.8 percent of its sales last year, followed distantly by Europe with a 13.5 percent share. On some levels it makes sense that the U.S. is such a massive market for Kawasaki, given that it makes the JetSki, which is inexplicably the Official State Fish in no fewer than seven states, and as I understand it has replaced school busing in most of Florida.

Shin Watanabe, Nikkei Asia

Solar

Puerto Rico’s power grid has had serious issues and become incredibly unreliable, leading 10 percent of households in Puerto Rico to install a rooftop solar system, which in the aggregate accounts for double the capacity of the solar farms on the island. Of those homes with solar, 80 percent also have battery storage, which vastly exceeds the 13 percent of mainland U.S. rooftop solar customers. That said, things haven’t been working out perfectly; several of the solar companies are essentially finance firms serving as go-betweens buying panels from manufacturers and then hiring a third-party contractor to install them, mostly concerning themselves with loans, leases and tax credits that follow. In many cases, the household with solar panels on the roof and a battery in the garage doesn’t own any of it, and still pays a monthly lease to a solar firm rather than a monthly rate to a power company.

J. Edward Moreno, Sherwood News

Uranus

A new paper published Monday in Nature Astronomy argues that 40 years of thought about the magnetosphere of Uranus might be wrong, because the Voyager 2 spacecraft that captured the relevant data in 1986 might have just caught the planet on a bit of an off day. Specifically, the data from Voyager 2 suggested that Uranus’ protective magnetic field did not contain plasma, something that all the other planets have, which challenges radiation belt theory. The new study says that the flyby happened during a massive increase in solar activity, increasing the pressure of the solar wind on its magnetosphere by 20 times what’s typical, creating conditions for the planet that would otherwise occur only 4 percent of the time; if Voyager 2 had flown by just a week earlier, it probably would have found something way more normal. At the very least, it’s encouragement that perhaps we ought to yeet another satellite in the general direction of the baby blue one of these days just to see what’s up.

Jonathan O’Callaghan, The New York Times

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