By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Lotto

A French man identified as Jean-David, the victim of a stolen wallet, is somewhat intrigued to find that the thieves used his card to buy a winning French lottery ticket that’s worth €500,000 (US$523,000). Given that the thieves vanished before cashing it in, Jean-David is actually more than happy to split the cash with the thieves. La Française des Jeux said that nobody has submitted the ticket to cash out, and Jean-David is willing to withdraw his police complaint if the thieves come forward and share the money.

The Associated Press

Scam Gangs

The government of Thailand has been cracking down on a thriving scam industry operating in Myanmar, its neighbor that shares a huge amount of cross-border trade. Starting in early February, Thailand began cutting off electricity and fuel sold across the Myanmar border to problem areas, disrupting the gangs’ activities. That said, it’s projected to cause cross-border trade to drop by 20 percent this year. Exports from the Thai city of Mae Sot to Myanmar were worth 66.2 billion baht (US$1.97 billion) last year, a not insignificant sum. Trade at another border checkpoint of Mae Sai has slowed to a trickle despite being worth 17 billion baht (US$508 million). Overall, exports from Thailand to Myanmar came in at 1.1 trillion baht (US$32 billion) in 2024. For Myanmar, the real issue comes if the Cambodian border also gets cracked down; exports on that hit 142 billion baht (US$4.2 billion) last year.

Apornrath Phoonphongphiphat, Nikkei Asia

Boards

Corporate boards are getting grey, with companies on the board members of the Tokyo Stock Exchange averaging 62.2 years of age. The average comes in at 60.1 in the U.K., 59.3 in Germany, 59 in South Korea and 54.9 in Hong Kong. The New York Stock Exchange is older than them all at 62.9 years old on average. Some companies are deliberately going out of their way to recruit younger board members, especially those in the entertainment or trend-based industries. In an intergenerational transfer of power, Sanrio (owner of the Hello Kitty franchise) brought its average age in the boardroom down from 68 years old in 2020 to 51 in 2024.

Kentaro Tsutsumi, Nikkei Asia

Brave New World

Captain America: Brave New World fell 68 percent in its second weekend at the box office, making $28.3 million domestically and $289.4 million worldwide. The movie cost $180 million to make before marketing, which is actually pretty reasonable for a Marvel movie. While the second-week drop is precipitous, there’s a pretty good shot that this movie approaches profitability. While it’s at the top of the box office, the rest of the list is a real menagerie. The second place goes to the Stephen King adaptation The Monkey, with Paddington in Peru in third place and Dog Man in fourth.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Asteroids

The European Space Agency and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab are both out with new observations and calculations that reduce the risk of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the planet Earth. Last week, the probability that the asteroid impacts the planet was pegged at 3.1 percent, the highest impact probability NASA has ever recorded for an object this size. The Europeans said that the probability of 2024 YR4 causing serious problems is now down to 0.16 percent, while the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at JPL has the probability down to 0.28 percent. That said, one planet’s gain is another body’s loss; NASA says its new data ups the probability of 2024 YR4 hitting the Moon up to 1 percent, so thanks for taking one for the team, Moon.

Andrew Liszewski, The Verge

Frank Lloyd Wrong

Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright house, leaks in dozens of places, and is currently undergoing an effort to make it watertight at a cost of around $7 million. This is 40 times the cost of building it in the 1930s. The job will hopefully done by April. The walls of Fallingwater look like solid stone, but that’s a clever bamboozle on the part of the architect; they are actually hollow masonry tubes. While the cavities were originally filled with sandstone, all of that has been settling for decades. Now, water is collecting inside those wall cavities which seems bad. It’s a hard project to waterproof now, let alone in the 1930s, and Wright rejected the use of copper flashing where the roof intersects walls. The solution is to pump liquid grout into the hollow walls and add lead flashing (not copper) to keep the thing waterproof.

Fred A. Bernstein, The Wall Street Journal

Genetic Biocontrol

Clever genetic strategies to kill off mosquitos and other pests include a gene added to males that is then distributed across a large expanse. This gene causes the offspring of those genetically modified males to die before they reach reproductive age, which has been found to reduce mosquito populations by 95 percent. That said, there are shortcomings, namely that you need to wait a generation for the effect to take place. A new strategy is faster and uses similar genetic manipulations to diabolical ends: genetically engineering the male insects to make their, er, contribution during mating into a poison that eventually kills the female mosquito they conjugated with. The strategy worked when transferring venom from the Brazilian wandering spider and the Mediterranean snakelocks sea anemone into fruit flies, resulting in a 64 percent decrease in lifespan in the treated group.

Bill Sullivan, The Conversation

Readers of the Sunday edition, I had a scheduling bug hit this weekend — bit of a heavy travel schedule, whoops — but normal service shall resume.

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