By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Manga

Total manga sales came in at 704 billion yen (US$4.65 billion) in 2024. While that’s a really strong sales number, there’s a whole lot of shifts going on behind the scenes. For one, digital manga made up 73 percent of Japan’s domestic sales of manga in 2024, which is 20 percentage points higher than in 2019. This has had some reverberations across the industry, not the least of which is an 8.6 percent decline in print manga sales last year. Of the 15,000 new manga volumes published last year, 37 percent were digital first. Sales are expected to plateau sooner rather than later, at which point it’s expected that sales within the Japanese domestic market will begin to fall, at which point the industry will have to make up for those lost sales in the international market. That is one reason that (as of just this January) all four major manga publishers have launched a digital manga platform in the United States.

Richardson Handjaja, ICV2

Antarctica

An international team of scientists led by the British Antarctic Survey has completed Bedmap3. It assembled 6 decades of survey data of the continent (acquired by planes, ships, satellites and sleds) into the single most detailed map of the land beneath the 27.17 million cubic kilometer ice sheet. One fun find is a new spot with the thickest overlying ice. Previously, this was thought to be Astrolabe Basin in Adélie Land, but the new data puts it in Wilkes Land over an as-yet-unnamed canyon where the ice is 4,757 meters thick.

British Antarctic Survey

Homestake

From 1958 to 1990, The Homestake Mining Company processed millions of tons of uranium ore at a site in New Mexico, piping 21 million tons of uranium mill tailings into two unlined earthen pits in the process. Over the decades, this decayed into radon, and contamination seeped into four aquifers in the region. In 2022, after years of weighing what to do, the company announced that cleaning the groundwater just wasn’t feasible. Instead, it would buy up and demolish the homes inside of a 6,100-acre area (455 of 523 so far) and hand it over to the Department of Energy sometime around 2035. One issue? There is a fifth aquifer, the San Andres-Glorieta, which is the last remaining source of clean water in the region. At this time, there are 3 uranium plumes seeping slowly towards it, only held at bay by a hydraulic barrier that has used around 14 billion gallons of water since 1977.

Alicia Inez Guzmán, Searchlight New Mexico

SPC700

A component of the Super Nintendo console called the SPC700 is, in a deeply interesting twist, getting faster with age. The SPC700 is a coprocessor that Sony made for Nintendo and was supposed to have a digital signal processing rate of 32,000hz. However, ceramic resonators can run at higher frequencies when subjected to temperature changes, and in 2007 designers noticed that some Super Nintendos emulated at a frequency of 32,040Hz. This is important, especially because people want to emulate and compete for speedrun records on the games and take a shot at the history books on the systems. But, get this, an administrator of a tool-assisted speedrun bot has flagged that SPC700s are now running faster with age and possibly with use; the fastest in a set clocked at 32,182 Hz.

Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media

Dogs

China’s population has declined for three consecutive years, and the marriage rate fell by a fifth in 2024, hitting the lowest level in half a century. While China relaxed the one-child policy a decade ago, a baby boom has not materialized, and the market for baby formula in China dropped 21 percent from 2021 to 2024. Over the same period of time, however, demand for pets has boomed, and Goldman Sachs projects that pets will outnumber toddlers 2-to-1 by 2030. That means that the pet economy is poised to boom, on track to jump 40 percent by 2030, to 352 billion yuan (US$49 billion).

Karoline Kan, Bloomberg

Mount Spurr

A volcano in Alaska has drawn the attention of researchers at the Alaska Volcano Observatory who believe that recent gas emissions from Mount Spurr would indicate that new magma is forming under the volcano. This means an eruption is likely (though not certain) to occur within the next few weeks or months. Mount Spurr is 80 miles west of Anchorage and had eruptions in 1953 and 1992, the latter of which shut down Anchorage’s airport for 20 hours. The likeliest scenario would be an eruption from an opening 2 miles away from Spurr’s summit on Crater Peak. However, that could pose a risk to those within 20 miles of the volcano and create sandstorm-like visibility problems in Anchorage.

Wesley Early, Alaska Public Media

Yearn for the Mines

A Minecraft Movie hits cinemas on April 4, and it’s currently tracking to a solid $58 million opening in North America. Video games have become hot sources of Hollywood inspiration whether it’s hits like the Sonic franchise or the Mario franchise. Given its status as the single best-selling video game franchise of all time, studio bigwigs looking to get teens back into the cinema consider Minecraft an incredibly desirable adaptation.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

This week in the (unlocked!) Sunday edition, I spoke to John Adkins, who writes the outstanding newsletter Animation Obsessive.

Numlock Sunday: John Adkins on what the Flow win means Mar 9 Read full story

I love this newsletter, it’s a personal must-read of mine, and last week following the thrilling win for Flow at the Academy Awards I loved the post the Animation Obsessive team wrote about it and diving deep into just why this is such a milestone in the field of animation. We spoke about how the European funding model differs from the American one, why it’s so remarkable that an Academy Award winning movie was made in Blender, and what this means for animation.

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