By Walt Hickey

Cattle

Uruguay has been rocked by a national financial scandal: 6,000 investors fell victim to what appears to be a Ponzi scheme when $300 million worth of cattle turned out to never have existed. Three companies have gone into court-appointed receivership specialized in raising investments from patrons in exchange for stakes in large cattle businesses, a massive industry in the country. This kind of arrangement oversees herds of 12 million cattle. The largest of the affected firms, Conexion Ganadera, owed $384 million to investors but only had $158 million worth of assets; in that one case alone, cattle worth $226 million didn’t actually exist. Republica Ganadera was short $70 million and Grupo Larrarte was short $12.3 million.

Ken Parks, Bloomberg

Checkerboard

Because of the unique way that the American West was parceled out, many states have plots of federal land — which can be used by hunters — that are boxed in by private property. The owners of that private land have historically been peeved over a practice known as “corner-crossing”, which is when a hunter will step from one parcel of federal land to another only at the corners of a rectangle. Due to math, this means momentarily stepping over private land. After failing to get a verdict of trespassing against four elk hunters from Missouri who corner-cut near his land, one landowner in Wyoming pressed civil trespassing charges. The highly-watched case would decide the status of the Unlawful Inclosures Act of 1885 and the fate of 8 million acres of corner-locked public lands in the West. In the end, a unanimous verdict from the three-judge panel found in favor of the hunters and unambiguously backed corner-crossing.

Amanda Eggert, Montana Free Press

Mesopotamia

Last fall, archaeologists came across a remarkable cache of 200 clay cuneiform tablets and 60 sealings in the town of Tello in Iraq, which was also the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu. It’s an amazing find, and the tablets include school texts from the training process for scribes dating back to the Akkad period (2300 to 2150 BC), giving insight into what precisely it took to run the first empire ever recorded. The sealings indicate they originated from “Naram-Sin, the mighty, god of Akkad, king of the four quarters (of the world): Lugal-ushumgal, the scribe, governor, your servant,” so, you know, strictly mid-level bureaucrat stuff it seems.

Hadani Ditmars, The Art Newspaper

Two-Hit Wonders

A new analysis dove deep into the phenomenon of the two-hit wonder: those artists who managed to escape the notoriety of being just a one-hit wonder by managing a second popular hit but never really broke out far beyond that. Looking at the Billboard Hot 100 charts from its inception to 2010, there have been 3,271 artists who have landed at least two top-30 hits — one of which made the top 10 but never again pulled off the feat and never actually managed to have a top 10 album. The list, in order of popularity, is full of ’em; the most popular is the artist Gerardo Ortiz, who performed “Rico Suave” ( No. 7 hit) and “We Want the Funk” (No. 16), followed by a-ha with “Take On Me” (No. 1) and “The Sun Always Shines on T.V.” (No. 20). Other major two-hit wonders include Cascada with “Evacuate the Dance Floor” and “Everytime We Touch” (No. 25 and No. 10) and Redbone with “Come and Get Your Love” and “The Witch Queen of New Orleans” (at No. 5 and No. 21).

Chris Dalla Riva, Can’t Get Much Higher

Penny

It sure looks like the penny’s days may be numbered, with 42 percent of Americans saying they support the elimination of the penny, up 8 percentage points in just over ten years. At the same time, opposition to its elimination has plummeted from 51 percent in 2014 to just 30 percent in 2025. The real impediment here is going to be nickels. While pennies are wasteful and cost more to make than they’re worth (three cents a penny), it’s actually way worse for nickels at 11 cents per five-cent piece. The elimination of the penny might cause demand for nickels to spike, which would end up being even more expensive. However, the nickel problem isn’t anywhere near as well known as the penny problem, and so just 26 percent want to eliminate nickels, while 48 percent are opposed. No, the right move is to be decisive here, and when it comes to coinage, work at the level of dimes and dimes alone.

Alexander Rossell Hayes, YouGov

Resale

Renting clothes from large online shops or buying them secondhand and reselling them on online platforms is no longer on the fringes of the retail business. For the youngest consumers, obtaining clothing for just a short time and then sending it on its way has become a real fashion staple. The secondhand clothing market is projected to hit $367 billion over the next four years, well above the $227 billion last year. By 2029, the American market alone is forecasted to reach $74 billion in sales.

Parija Kavilanz, Bagable

Difference Frequency Generation

Newly published research advances the concept of “audible enclaves,” which is when a sound wave is manipulated to only be hearable in a localized pocket of sound. The tech that could make it possible to, for instance, send an audio message to a single individual in a large crowd. The technique uses ultrasound — sound waves above 20kHZ, well above human hearing — as a seemingly silent carrier for audible sound. The technique takes two ultrasound beams of different frequencies individually silent to the human ear and makes them intersect at a specific point in space. At that point, the ultrasound beams generate a new sound wave that is audible to the person in that area. For instance, two ultrasonic beams at 40 kHz and 39.5 kHz create a new sound wave at 0.5 kHz or 500 Hz when overlapping, which is audible to humans. It’s cool James Bond stuff, sure, but oh man, paranoid people are going to have such a bad time with this “voices only you can hear” technology.

Jiaxin Zhong and Yun Jing, The Conversation

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