Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.

Japan becomes the fifth nation to land a spacecraft on the Moon

Summary: Last Friday, Japan became only the fifth country to successfully soft-land on the Moon when its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM mission touched down within its target area, livestreaming the landing on YouTube.

Context: Japan’s space agency, JAXA, announced that the craft’s solar array wasn’t operating as it should soon after landing, so its battery drained in a matter of hours, but the mission is still considered to be a success as even crashing something into the Moon is a big deal, but safely landing within an intended target area, and then sending photos home of the surface of the Moon is even more remarkable to the point that it’s been accomplished only 22 times by four countries (the US, USSR, China, and India) since the first successful landing in 1959, leading up to this Japanese mission.

—Ars Technica

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Billions of cicadas will buzz this spring as two broods emerge at the same time

Summary: Two broods of periodical cicadas, which spend the majority of their life underground before popping up to the surface every 13 or 17 years, depending on their brood’s cycle, will emerge at the same time this year, blanketing the eastern portion of the United States in what look like giant crickets and their loud mating sounds.

Context: The last time the emergence of these two broods lined up in this way was in 1803, and the degree to which even just one brood can carpet the landscape with harmless but omnipresent and loud and crunchy cicadas and their cast-off exoskeletons cannot be overstated—they tend to upend local ecosystems and can disrupt sleep cycles, make driving more dangerous, and generally dominate the visual and audible landscape in the areas where they’re most prevalent; the afflicted regions will begin to see these two waves of cicadas when the ground temperature reaches something like 64 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 18 degrees Celsius), and that typically happens sometime late-April to mid-May, depending on which part of the country we’re looking at.

—NPR News

Australia’s 'golden visa' scheme for wealthy investors axed

Summary: A scheme that allowed wealthy overseas investors to attain an Australian visa if they invested more than $5 million Australian dollars (or around $3.3 million US dollars) in the country has been halted, the government saying it led to poor economic outcomes.

Context: This program, which issued so-called “significant investor visas” or SIVs to folks with money who the Australian government hoped would then invest more of their resources in the country, apparently did not lead to more investment, and critics have long contended that these golden visas mostly served to help corrupt officials park illicit funds in Australia at the expense of more deserving people who might otherwise be welcomed into the country; the government will now pivot its resources toward attracting skilled workers, reserving more visas for them and fewer for the sorts of people who might have previously used this program for its money laundering potential and various wealth-hiding loopholes.

—BBC News

The share of employees in the US who are working from home at least some of the time is way down from its pandemic-era peak, but it’s also way up from the 3% of people who worked from home before COVID-19 upended everything.

—Axios

53%

Percentage of inflation in the second and third quarters of 2023 that resulted from corporations raising prices, rather than broader economic variables.

In other words: corporations saw an opportunity to raise their profits (when people already assumed inflation was high, so they could justify those price-increases more easily, pocketing the difference) and that “greedflation” has led to a windfall for consumer-facing companies, but smaller bank accounts for those who buy their products (and damage to the economies in which they all operate).

—The Guardian

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