That's Interesting

  • Two Broods of More Than a Trillion Cicadas Will Emerge in the U.S. This Year

    More than a trillion cicadas will be coming to the U.S. in an event that has not happened since Thomas Jefferson was U.S. president in 1803.  Two adjacent broods of the red-eyed flying cicadas will emerge from the ground in April, and residents in the Midwest and Southeast should brace themselves for a season of high-pitched buzzing.  2024 will mark the first time in more than 200 years that Brood XIX, which arrives every 13 years, and Brood XIII, which arrives every 17 years, will emerge at the same time.  The next co-emergence of these broods won’t happen for another 221 years.

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  • The new car batteries that could power the electric vehicle revolution

    Researchers are experimenting with different designs that could lower costs, extend vehicle ranges and offer other improvements.

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  • What Plants Hear

    They sense the buzzing sounds of pollinators, the vibrations of the wind.

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  • One in five butterfly species sold online across borders

    Humankind’s appreciation for butterflies spans cultures and millennia, including the practice of assembling butterfly collections. This paper monitored the global e-commerce platform eBay.com for one year and obtained 50,555 time-stamped transactions of 3767 species (739 genera) of butterflies. This is nearly 20% of all butterfly species on Earth. A total of 552 sellers were based in 44 countries across five continents. At least 96% of the traded species required transportation of the specimen from its country of origin to its seller, usually from the Global South to the United States and Europe.

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  • The Hidden Butterfly Trade

    Butterflies are perhaps the most extensively traded animals on the planet.  But just how many are traveling, of which potentially endangered or threatened species, and from which points of origin, has been a mystery.  Unlike elephant ivory or pangolin hide, butterflies pass invisibly through X-ray scanners at international ports of entry.

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  • Quadrophobia: Strategic Rounding of EPS Data

    Managers’ incentives to round up reported earnings per share (EPS) cause an underrepresentation of the number 4 in the first post-decimal digit of EPS, or “quadrophobia.” This article has developed a novel measure of aggressive financial reporting practices based on a firm’s history of quadrophobia. Quadrophobia is pervasive, persistent, and successfully predicts future restatements, Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement actions, and class action litigation.

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  • The Moderating Effect of CEO Power on the Board Composition–Firm Performance Relationship

    Prior studies of the relationship between the composition of boards of directors and firm performance offer equivocal results. Drawing on agency and power circulation theories, this article attempts to reduce this equivocality by asserting that CEO power moderates the relationship. Specifically, an outside director dominated board is needed to check a powerful CEO, but monitoring by other executives provides sufficient constraints on CEOs with low power.

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  • Drawing Up the Bill: Is ESG Related to Stock Returns Around the World?

    This article aims to provide the most comprehensive analysis to date of the relation between ESG ratings and stock returns, using 16,000+ stocks in 48 countries and seven different ESG rating providers. The article finds very little evidence that ESG ratings are related to global stock returns over 2001-2020.

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  • How the World’s Deadliest Crises Go Unseen

    In the Central African Republic, researchers found an astronomical death rate. Could a major emergency be invisible?

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  • Counterproductive Sustainable Investing: The Impact Elasticity of Brown and Green Firms

    The article develops a new measure of impact elasticity, defined as a firm’s change in environmental impact due to a change in its cost of capital. It shows empirically that a reduction in financing costs for firms that are already green leads to small improvements in impact at best. In contrast, increasing financing costs for brown firms leads to large negative changes in firm impact. Thus, sustainable investing that directs capital away from brown firms and toward green firms may be counterproductive, in that it makes brown firms more brown without making green firms more green.

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