By Walt Hickey

Render Unto

Utah is seeing a brisk business for models who have long hair and a beard who can passably pull off a Jesus look for family portraits and wedding announcements for couples that want to feature the religious figure directly in their pictures. Models charge about $100 to $200 an hour and, with the right look, can retain a reliable side hustle as the physical manifestation of Jesus in someone else’s pictures. It’s a legitimate market in no small part because Mormon men who work or volunteer for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the same people who tend to be clients of Christ-for-hires — are generally expected to shave every day and keep hair short, which does tend to conflict with the desired aesthetic. It’s also a diverse market: some seek out that smiling Jesus, others prefer the jacked carpenter Jesus, while other clients are just looking for the right set of footprints in the Salt Lake sand.

Bradley Olson, The Wall Street Journal

Murder Hornets

My fellow Americans: we got them. The hunt is over, and state and federal officials now believe that five years after invasive hornets were spotted in Washington state for the first time, they have been successfully eradicated from the United States, averting a disaster scenario where they became established and dominated local pollinators. It’s an accomplishment of multiple levels of government working in concert to attack a serious problem. When all was said and done, officials found four nests related to the hornets in Whatcom County, and it’s been three years since any new hornet discoveries. The northern Washington region is economically vital for agriculture, specifically the millions of pounds of raspberries and blueberries cultivated each year, so any invasive species introduced — whether its this recent invasion of Vespa mandarinia or that pesky infestation of malevolent spirits from the Black Lodge that cropped up in the early 1990s and late 2010s — is of serious concern and worthy of federal intervention.

Mike Baker, The New York Times

Popular

The soundtrack to Wicked has unsurprisingly spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Soundtracks chart, but what is interesting is that several songs are seeing bona fide radio airplay, which is rare for a musical. It’s due in no small part to the role of pop star Ariana Grande in the film and radio stations playing a proven radio artist regardless of the genre at hand. “Popular” has hit No. 27 on the Billboard Pop Airplay radio chart, while the showstopper “Defying Gravity” has debuted to No. 39 on the Pop Airplay chart. The label knows the score, and has released a 3:33 edit of “Defying Gravity” to try to get the 7:39 song onto the airwaves and cut a 2:53 mix of “Popular,” which is ordinarily 4:01. It’s worked: “Popular” had an all-format airplay audience of 15.2 million through December 12, and “Defying Gravity” racked up 6.8 million in radio reach.

Gary Trust, Billboard

Turkey

Turkey has built up a serious medical tourism industry. They usually focus on hair treatments, which I have to be very careful in writing about because this is an email newsletter and this is the exact kind of malady and procedure that tends to get spam filters firing up torches and waving pitchforks, but let’s say that people tend to fly to Istanbul with hardwood floors and come back home with carpet. The first transplants began in Turkey in 2002, and now there are at least 500 clinics in Istanbul alone. Procedures go for $3,000 to $4,000, a fraction of the cost of what you’d get in America. In the third quarter of this year alone, 1.1 million people visited Turkey for health care services.

Alex Abad-Santos, Vox

Eavesdropping

The 4 billion birds that migrate across North America annually can be heard emitting nocturnal flight calls to their flocks at night, brief 50-millisecond chirps that can guide the bird and its peers on their journey. Birdwatchers are asleep, and it’s dark so you can’t really spot them, but a clever program — BirdVoxDetect — that installed listening devices along migration routes and used tech to isolate and identify their sounds has made it possible to get a brand-new source of information about the migration. As of August, after eight years of research, a paper outlining their work was published, with a full season of 6,671 hours of recordings turning up 233,124 flight calls. An earlier study demonstrated a particularly cool use of this data: Acoustic data turns out to be a pretty effective way to estimate the total biomass of migrating birds, and ends up being just as effective as radar.

Christian Elliott, MIT Technology Review

Billboards

Ad spending will top $1 trillion this year, with digital ads taking up 71.4 percent of it, a pretty significant jump from the 53 percent market share that digital ads had five years ago. This has set up a pretty fundamental conundrum: If you actually want your ad to break through, what’s exactly the point in advertising where everyone else is anyway? That’s one reason that even as digital ad spending spirals up, outdoor or out-of-home advertising is actually still doing splendidly. Digital ads cannibalize TV, radio and newspaper ads, not actually billboards or benches of bus shelters, it turns out, and spending on out-of-home ads has remained not only steady for the past several years, but might even grow in the soon future.

Rani Molla, Sherwood News

Stars

In yet another example of a brutal real estate market for young couples seeking a viable starter home, astronomers found a double-star system near the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. This means that a binary system can survive near the black hole, which is surprising. The black hole in question has a mass of 4 million suns, while the binary stars have a mass of 2.8 suns and 0.7 suns each and appear to have formed 2.7 million years ago. In general, the situation is untenable long-term with such a large neighbor. Either they’ll be torn apart or forced together to become a single star, depending on the distance — and it seems like these crazy kids are gonna make it, and become one star.

Daniel Clery, Science

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