You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
30 years ago
The show will go on — sans host. The Oscars, for the second time ever and the first time in 30 years, will not have an official host. The only other time this happened, the ceremony began with “an 11-minute musical number featuring a duet between Rob Lowe and an actress playing Snow White.” [ABC News]
1/3 of its glaciers
One-third or more of the Himalayan ice cap is “doomed to melt due to climate change,” according to a new report called The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment. They’ll be gone by the year 2100, the report finds, affecting hundreds of millions of people who rely on the glaciers as “a critical water store.” [The Guardian]
4 months
You’ll have to get your impressionism, cubism and neo-plasticism fixes elsewhere this summer, as the famed Museum of Modern Art in New York City will be closed from June to October. It’s the last stage of MoMA’s $400 million renovation project, during which the museum will rehang its entire collection and add 40,000 square feet of space. [The New York Times]
3.2 feet of rainfall
Parts of Queensland, Australia, have gotten as much as 3.2 feet of rain in the past week. Hundreds have been evacuated and the Australian government has issued crocodile and snake warnings. An 11-foot crocodile was seen crawling the highway north of the city of Townsville. [ABC News]
About $137 million in cryptocurrencies
Some $137 million worth of the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum are frozen and inaccessible in a Canadian digital platform called Quadriga, after its 30-year-old founder and CEO, the only person with the password, died. The company reportedly owes money to 115,000 affected users. “Despite repeated and diligent searches, I have not been able to find them written down anywhere,” the founder’s widow said of the password. [Reuters]
59 new emoji
The Unicode Consortium, which is in charge of such things, has announced 59 new emoji along with 171 new variations on existing emoji. The new ones include a deaf person, people in wheelchairs, people with probing canes, a mechanical arm and leg and service dogs. They also include an otter, a sloth, an orangutan, an ice cube, garlic, falafel and a ringed planet. [The Verge]
Love digits? Find even more in FiveThirtyEight’s book of math and logic puzzles, “The Riddler.” I hope you dig it.
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