By Walt Hickey

Animation

Japan’s anime industry has become globally renown, but a new spotlight on labor conditions within the industry — as well as an exodus of workers to the video game business — is prompting calls for change. Animators are paid on commission of a few hundred yen per frame of animation, and the average annual pay for an animator was ¥4.55 million (about $30,500) as of 2022, well below the compensation in peer countries. That sounds bad, but it’s actually an improvement; it’s 78 percent higher than the ¥2.55 million ($17,000) paid annually in 2009, but still not enough to stymie poaching from the games business. Part of the issue is that animation remains ordered at ¥250 to ¥350 per frame, and the very companies that subcontract the work from the primary production companies tend to operate deeply in the red.

Akinobu Masubuchi, Nikkei Asia

Auction

After a fast-flying auction where bidding began at $250, a one-of-a-kind extruded miracle sold for $72,000 ($87,840 with buyer’s premium) on Sunday, with a 3-inch collectible Flamin’ Hot Cheeto that is sort of shaped like the Pokémon Charizard has sold. The Cheeto is all natural — like an opal extracted whole from the hewn earth of an Australian pit, this specimen was discovered whole and undamaged within the packaging — and comes with an enclosure to ensure the integrity of the phenomenon is maintained. This is, however, not exactly a record-setting hammer, as a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto resembling the late, great gorilla Harambe sold for $99,900 in 2017.

Nicole Carpenter, Polygon

Texas

New details are emerging about a controversial lotto arbitrage that occurred in 2023, specifically the role that the Texas Lottery Commission played in a drawing where one player bought enough tickets to guarantee that they would win a $95 million jackpot. Lotto Texas is a $1 ticket where six numbers from 1 to 54 are selected, with 25.8 million combinations. Sales are generally around 1 million per drawing, which presents an arbitrage opportunity to spend $25.8 million to buy a ticket with every possible number combination once a jackpot gets sufficiently high. An entity called Rook TX did this very thing, buying virtually all 25.8 million possible combinations, a play planned in Malta and then funded by a London betting company, and which more specifically was carried out by four retailers in Texas who were helped by the Texas Lottery Commission to fill rush orders for dozens of extra terminals, and not challenge methods of entering millions of ticket orders into state terminals with personal iPads and QR codes, leading to a win and taking the lump sum of $57.8 million. The controversy mostly comes down to at what point of being helpful is the Texas Lottery Commission just helping a consortium of gamblers rig the Texas Lotto.

Matt Levine, Bloomberg

Bon Voyager

NASA made the call to turn off the cosmic ray subsystem experiment aboard Voyager 1 on February 25, and will shut off Voyager 2’s low-energy charged particle instrument on March 24, which brings the number of operating science equipment on each of the spacecraft down to three each. Both of the space probes are powered by a radioisotope power system that runs on decaying plutonium, but each of them loses about 4 watts of power per year. As a result, triage has to be done and experiments have to end in order to keep the overall probes going as they hurtle away from the solar system. A cool thing about these systems being shut down is that they use a rotating platform powered by a stepper motor providing a 15.7 watt pulse every 192 seconds. The motors were only tested to run to 500,000 steps, which was good enough to get to Saturn, which Voyager 2 did in 1980. When it’s deactivated, the motor on Voyager 2 will have completed over 8.5 million steps.

DC Agle and Cala Cofield, NASA

Needle Drops

A new analysis looked at media citation data from Chartmetric and Tunefinder to find out the most commonly played pop songs in film and television. It’s a reliable list of needle drops with some pretty specific thematic tie ins; both “Tubthumping” by Chumbawumba and “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire had 39 appearances apiece and tied for sixth place, which makes sense because they’re the simple sonic shorthand for “this is a great party!” and “this is a great party and it’s not yet the 1990s,” respectively. At the top of the list with 52 spins is “This is How We Do It,” another party anthem. Other songs have an even more unambiguous scene to accompany, particularly “Let’s Get It On” by Marvin Gaye (38 appearances).

Daniel Parris, Stat Significant

Dude Perfect

The watch time of sports-related content on YouTube was up 30 percent over the past year, which is no small feat given that sports programming is some of the most aggressively licensed and unsharable video on the internet. This is one reason for the ascent of channels like Dude Perfect, which specialize in making trick shots and filming otherwise remarkable feats of accuracy and athleticism. It’s a solid business; Dude Perfect has parlayed their 15 billion views and just opened a new, 80,000 square-foot production facility outside of Dallas on the back of a $100 million investment, which will also go towards building out a trick shot theme park, which I am kind of curious about because if the whole point of making a trick shot is that it’s a one-in-a-million feat I can’t help but think that this theme park will be somewhat unpleasant for the 999,999 other guests.

Aisha Counts, Bloomberg

Oxygen

Scientists examine polar ice cores to extract bubbles of air contained within, providing a reliable archive of atmospheric data going back 6 million years. That said, there were lots of years before that, and getting air samples from those vintages is pretty hard. That’s one reason that rocks containing liquids and gasses trapped within have become objects of significant study, allowing researchers to get samples of air going back billions of years. Researchers crush rocks in a vacuum-sealed press, and a mass spectrometer analyses what comes out, and when done on lots of rocks you can get a decent idea of what was in the wind when they formed. Barite crystal deposits in Australia have given information about the air 3 billion years ago. One recent study published in Gondwana Research found that the atmosphere 815 million years ago was 6.6 percent oxygen, which conflicted with a 2016 paper in Geology that put forth the idea it was as high as 11 percent oxygen. Another sample going back 1.4 billion years ago — in the “boring billion” when plate tectonics was stable and evolution was slow — found oxygen levels of 1 percent, which might have even supported early animals.

Paul Voosen, Science

Apologies for any mis-timed deliveries this week, I am traveling and my greatest shame is that I am kind of bad at time zones. Alas!

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