By Walt Hickey

Vape King

In 2023, vape sales hit $6 billion in the U.S. market and another $15.2 billion in the rest of the world, totaling a $21.2 billion business. One of the biggest players is Zhang Shangwei, the proprietor of Heavenly Gifts, which rose from a trusted online e-cigarette seller in the early 2000s to become the behemoth of the business. Zhang Shangwei is behind the most popular vape brands like Geekvape, Lost Mary and the seemingly omnipresent Elf Bar. Heaven Gifts has 30 million customers in 80 countries, and Zhang himself is now worth $2.9 billion on the back of his 69 percent stake in iMiracle Shenzhen Technologies, the company of record for Heaven Gifts.

Timothy McLaughlin, Bloomberg

Clone

A new study in Molecular Ecology shines a light on a fascinating unique species of seaweed, specifically a unique bladderwrack found in the Baltic Sea. The genetic analysis reveals that this is not actually a unique species of seaweed at all; it’s just a clone of a specific bladderwrack, one which has cloned itself into new populations all across the Baltic, spreading over 500 kilometers of coast in the Bothnian sea from Öregrund to Umeå. Millions of individuals singlehandedly dominate the coastline in some regions, the female may be the largest clone of any organism on the planet.

University of Gothenburg

Carbon Capture

The Inflation Reduction Act established an $85 per metric ton subsidy for geologic carbon sequestration, which has been great news for the ethanol industry, making money by injecting the carbon it generates underground. Places like Central Illinois have some extremely favorable geology for the task. Archer-Daniels-Midland has sequestered 4.5 million metric tons of CO2 in this manner over the past decade, and there are plans for another 20 wells in Illinois. There is one issue at the ADM plant, though, as in 2024 it was discovered that 8,000 metric tons of CO2 and saline brine had migrated into an unexpected and unauthorized zone after likely corroding the 13 Chrome steel pipes.

Christian Elliott, Undark

Rights

Despite some new antagonism, LGBTQ+ rights remain remarkably popular in the United States. In every single state, a majority of people now back same-sex marriage. States that had seen high levels of opposition now have a majority of residents outright supporting same-sex marriage, including Oklahoma (where 50 percent back it), West Virginia (51 percent), and Louisiana (52 percent). Overall, 67 percent of Americans favor the right to same-sex marriage while just 29 percent oppose it. Despite rollbacks, 75 percent of Americans favor nondiscrimination laws for LGBTQ people as of 2024, a ratio that holds across pretty much every age demographic and gender.

Public Religion Research Institute

DVD

It appears that 2024 was indeed the year that the DVD and Blu-Ray business sputtered out, in no small part due to the collapse of some of the last remaining holdout DVD rental services like Redbox. Physical disc sales in the U.S. were down 23 percent year over year, declining from $1.3 billion in 2023 to $959.6 million in 2024, finally breaking below that billion-dollar level. Overall, that is a 94.2 percent decrease from 2006, when the DVD business hit an all-time high of $16.6 billion. With total domestic home entertainment spending reaching $57 billion, this now means that the physical disc business is just 1.6 percent of that pie.

Robert Steiner, VIP+

Nest Egg

A new study published in Ecology used the expiration dates printed on discarded plastic wrappers that were incorporated into bird nests to develop estimates on the age of those nests. It is a clever strategy for parlaying an ongoing plastic waste catastrophe into good science. The study sought to find out the nest age of common coots (a type of bird, it turns out!) in Amsterdam. They’re heavy — weighing a kilogram — and often add debris to their twig nests. Most of the nests were not old, rarely going back more than three years. However, one nest was a real classic: the “Rokin nest” contained 635 bits of plastic, and turned out to be a time capsule of waste. It contained not only 15 face masks from the pandemic, but in its base was a candy bar wrapper that promoted the 1994 FIFA World Cup. This leads the researchers to believe that at least three generations of coots used the nest over the course of its estimated 30-year span.

Gennaro Tomma, Science

A23a

After forty years of meandering around, the A23a iceberg that broke away from the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica in 1986 has grounded itself on shallow seafloor about 80 kilometers off the coast of the South Georgia island. It’s 300 meters tall, is beached on the ridge of the sea shelf and is now showing advanced signs of decay; once 3,900 square kilometers, it’s now estimated to be 3,234 square kilometers. It’ll grind itself against the rock, bulldozing any ecosystem underneath it in the short term and dumping a ton of nutrients into the water in the long-term.

Georgina Rannard and Erwan Rivault, BBC News

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