Wild Hogs, BTS And More

Wild Hogs

There are over 6 million feral Hogs roaming around the USA and causing as much as $1.5 billion of damage.
It is hard to reduce their ever-growing population due to the only poisons that can kill them are illegal in most states.
Instead, pet food companies pay hunters to kill them so they can be used in pet foods as cheap meat.

BTS

KPOP sensations BTS caused a huge controversy over whether they should be sent to mandatory military service or not.
The reason for the controversy? BTS contributes over $5 Billion to the Korean economy every year and by sending them to military service would reduce the amount of money they generate by $2 Billion a year.

Giphy

Facebook was fined £50 million by the UK Competitions and Markets Authority because Facebook refused to tell them about buying Giphy, the GIF sharing app, for $400 million and what they intended to do with it.

NCAP Tests

The NCAP Test stands for the New Car Assessment Program and is designed to put brand-new car models through a series of tests to make sure they are up to a high safety standard.
Until 2019, the American test only had 5 criteria and remained the same for decades. As such, manufacturers knew how to pass them easily and from 2010 - 2019 the number of road fatalities increased by 11%.
In Europe during the same time period, there were 21 criteria and more get added every few years. As a result, road fatalities dropped by 23%.

Flies

Flies are the second biggest pollinator after bees. A recent study of 105 different crop types found that flies would visit and pollinate 72% of them, including in greenhouses and polytunnels where bees don't visit.
On top of their pollination abilities, they also eat aphids that harm crops, eating as much as 20% of all aphids in the UK.
They also breed much faster than bees do and so the population size rarely diminishes.

Job Losses

Before the 2020 pandemic, a survey predicted that 37 million jobs would be lost over the next decade due to automation, with robots and artificial intelligence replacing humans to do the basic tasks a company require.
After the pandemic created a greater push to use automation in the logistics workplace to not rely as heavily on Covid-19-catching humans, the people behind the survey revised that figure upward, to 45 million job losses.

5G Smartphones

In 2019, the number of Smartphones worldwide that were capable of accessing 5G was 16 million.
By 2022 that number grew to over 710 million.
160 million of these are in China while the USA has around 35 million.

Copper Trading

A trader who worked in the commodities market once paid $36 million for 6,000 tons of copper ore.
However, somewhere between leaving the port in Turkey and arriving in China, someone stole all the copper ore and replaced it with rocks that were spray painted to look like copper.
Turkish police arrested 13 people involved in the fraud.

Sea Slugs

Scientific researchers once cut the heads of 16 sea slugs to see what would happen.
Of the 16, six of the heads managed to regenerate entirely new bodies, with three of the six going on to lead normal, long lives.

Breweries

There are 11 Trappist breweries in the world.
A Trappist brewery produces and sells beer from inside an abbey of Trappist monks and requires a careful production process which involves prayer and a religious process to produce the beer.
Once the beer is produced, it is sold to commercial beer companies with the money split between the upkeep and living costs of the monks at the abbey, and with charities the abbey supports.
But don't think that a Trappist brewery is just a hobby to keep the monks busy. One abbey produced over $77 million of beer in 2019.