By Walt Hickey

Mobsters

The Alto Knights, a Robert De Niro crime movie that became a pet project for Warner Bros, had a bad showing over the weekend. CEO David Zaslev at a budget of $45 million, bombed over the weekend, bringing in just $3.2 million. The reality is that The Alto Knights — where De Niro plays dual, dueling roles — is a vestige from an earlier era, as mobster movies have failed to play at the box office in any significant way for years. Americans are so over the genre that 3 of the top 4 grossing locations for the film were, in fact, in Canada.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Congestion Pricing

New York City’s congestion pricing program, the first of its kind in the United States, is consistently performing as intended, bringing in $100.6 million in revenue over the first two months of operation. Even after operating costs are factored in, it is well on track to bring in the $500 million annually that it intended to produce, which will go on to fund infrastructure projects that benefit the metropolitan area. In February, an average of 481,907 vehicles enter the congestion zone south of 60th Street daily.

Sri Taylor and Myles Miller, Bloomberg

Technically Also Congestion Pricing

Last year Mount Fuji in Japan drew 204,316 hikers, down from the 221,322 hikers in 2023 thanks to new fees implemented to access the trails in an attempt to reduce overcrowding. Last week authorities announced they would introduce a flat 4,000 yen (US$27) fee to hike all 4 of Mount Fuji’s main trails, increasing the 2,000 yen fee that Yamanashi Prefecture charged to climb the popular Yoshida trail and adding a fee to the Fujinomiya, Subashiri and Gotemba trails overseen by the Shizuoka Prefecture. The prefecture had been weighing a fee between 3,000 and 5,000 yen for their trails. Japan’s tourism boom continues, with a record 36.9 million travelers visiting last year, up 15.6 percent from the previous high set in 2019.

Radiosondes

Budget cuts to the National Weather Service and reduced staffing mean that some offices of the agency are cutting back on weather balloon launches, which will limit the data collected and fed into the sophisticated computing systems that model weather outcomes. In late February, Kotzebue, Alaska suspended balloon launches owing to staff shortages. In March, the offices in Albany, New York and Gray, Maine announced they expected disruptions to launch schedules, with Albany missing all 14 of its morning launches since. Last week, Omaha, Nebraska and Rapid City, South Dakota announced suspensions to launches, meaning a big gap in the middle of the country. Additionally, 6 other offices announced they would cut balloon launches from 2 to 1 per day. This poses large issues if allowed to continue. Normally, weather stations around the world launch balloons at midnight and noon Greenwich Mean Time. The balloons then ascend to 100,000 feet and radio back atmospheric conditions with a radiosonde in a snapshot extending upward. Radiosonde data is the second-highest most impactful form of weather data collection behind only the ATMS systems on NOAA’s satellites and is crucial for accurate forecasts. We can deal with some balloons getting lost, or some locations failing to report — Tallahassee, Florida has had a helium shortage and Chatham, Massachusetts can’t access its launch site anymore because of erosion — but if the weather balloon system gets choked off, weather reports will suffer.

Matt Lanza, The Eyewall

Congestion

The asteroid 2024 YR4 is the worrisome rock that was held to be in actual danger of colliding with Earth, but it was ruled out for a collision with our planet in 2032. That said, 2024 YR4 orbits the Sun 3 times for every 1 time Jupiter does, which means that it takes an orbit of around 4 years, meaning it’ll have close calls with Earth well after the foreseeable future. That 3:1 relationship with Jupiter is rare, and it’s rare for a selfishly bad reason: asteroids with a 3:1, 5:2, or 2:1 resonance with Jupiter exist in very small numbers mostly because lots of them have collided at one point or another with one of the inner planets over the past millions of years. The few that remain will probably have another shot at it eventually. We currently know of only 40 percent of the asteroids that are large enough to cause regional damage and close enough to Earth’s orbit to actually do the job, and an upcoming surveyor will do a good job of getting that up to 90 percent as mandated by Congress.

Martin Connors, The Conversation

Pricing

Researchers at University College London have found a way to track coordinated pump-and-dump crypto coin schemes pervading the internet. A new paper describing their tool, Perseus, indicates that the world of crypto pump-and-dumps involves just a small group of people making some real good money off the backs of everyone else. The tool analyzed messages sent between buyers and sellers on Telegram and detected 438 entities who were responsible for $3.2 trillion in artificial crypto coin trading, making something like $250 million a year through their coordinated price manipulation efforts.

Bob Yirka, Tech Xplore

Organics

In an exciting revelation, NASA’s Curiosity rover has found the largest organic compounds ever found on Mars within a 3.7 billion-year-old rock sample collected in an ancient Martian lakebed. Specifically, rovers on Mars had previously detected several classes of organic compounds that had chemical structures of up to six chained carbons, which is impressive but can also emerge from non-biological chemistry. The new finding is exciting because it is the detection of decane (C₁₀H₂₂), undecane (C₁₁H₂₄) and dodecane (C₁₂H₂₆) at the levels of tens of pmol. This is enough to get the attention of researchers since those kinds of chemicals might come from long-chain carboxylic acids. Those long chains of carbon could very well have come from abiotic sources, lifeless chemical reactions. However, the reason for excitement is that they’re also what you would find in the cell membranes of all life on Earth. In other words, it’s not a smoking gun, but if a gun was shot it’s exactly the kind of smell you’d expect to find.

Ian Sample, The Guardian

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