A mouse and oil drilling — The population of mice in Australia and oil drilling in the United States feature in this week’s The Crunch newsletter. Composite: Getty

The Crunch: Disappearing Aussie music, mouse plagues and the secrets of traffic lights

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Hello and welcome to a slightly delayed edition of The Crunch! You’ll shortly find out why.

In this week’s newsletter we have charts on … mouse plagues, football’s biggest upsets, masses of uncapped oil wells, how traffic lights work, the rise of K-pop, and how AI may have been unfairly blamed for killing off entry-level jobs.

But first … where did all the ‘Strayan accents go?

On Monday morning we published a deep dive into the Aria charts – Australia’s version of the Billboard Hot 100. We cobbled together 37 years of annual charts, finding a massive decline in the number of Australians artists, an increase in older and repeatedly featured songs and big changes in the genres dominating the countdown:

The decline in Australian artists on the aria charts

There’s a big interactive in there to let you explore the charts by artist, country and genre. If that’s not your bag, Andy and Josh built this awesome quiz to test your knowledge:

Elsewhere on the Guardian, we have the AI boom explained in six charts, which tracks the rise in costs, spending, capability and resources involved in the AI push.

Also, it’s nearly the World Cup! You can show off your football knowledge and predict a path to World Cup victory here and we also have this piece charting the biggest underdog victories from previous competitions – covering France 1998, Germany 2006, and more.

Five charts from the fortnight

1. Won’t someone think of the elephants?

The population of mice in parts of Australia has reached plague levels, damaging crops and farming equipment, exposing people and pets to disease and pesticides.

A plague is defined as more than 800 mice per hectare but some farming communities could be seeing as many as 10 times that.

If just imagining what 8,000 mice per hectare would look like isn’t enough for you, the ABC have a brilliant, animated visualisation:

The CSIRO estimates the plague in some farming communities has reached up to 8,000 mice per hectare

This isn’t the first time Australia has experienced such a plague. Nick made an animated map of a mouse plague back in 2021 – this one caused an estimated $1bn in damage (the plague, not the map).

2. Drill baby drill?

Our colleagues in the US have a story about oil drilling and remediation in the United States. It contains this map of drilling sites in just one county in Colorado:

The green dots (which are hard to see in this view, but are clearer in the original story) represent where companies have provided financial collateral for cleanups. The reddish-brown dots are plugged wells where cleanup was never completed.

3. Uniquely vulnerable

This story about how the Pacific region is particularly exposed to the oil crisis barely missed the cutoff for our last newsletter. But as the closure of the strait of Hormuz drags on, it only becomes more pertinent.

Many Pacific states heavily depend on oil

Some countries in the Pacific rely on oil products for up to 80% to 90% of their electricity, and also import a lot of food and other basic goods, and the rising cost of oil pushes up the prices for everything.

4. Red light, green light

If you’ve ever wondered how traffic lights work, Shri Khalpada at PerThirtySix has the story for you. There’s a bunch in here including a vignette on the first traffic light in the 1860s to why we use red, yellow and green for the lights. This is an animation (sadly not animated in our version) of different detection systems:

For the intersections that do have sensors, there are a few technical approaches to detecting vehicles.

While you’re on the site they’ve also recently published great visual explainers on solar panels and GPS.

5. Yeah, but what about this

By now you’ve probably heard the truism that AI is killing off entry-level jobs. Perennial Crunch favourite John Burn-Murdoch has covered an interesting paper suggesting another (or additional) culprit for the early-career hiring slowdown – remote work:

The entry-level share of hires began declining as remote work took off, and was falling steeply before AI arrived

Bookmarks

A (free) course on data feminism
How long is a river?
A story about racial profiling by ICE in New York and New Jersey
How noise affects the small population of Rice’s whales in the Gulf of Mexico
Why do rich countries do better in women’s football?

Off the Charts

So it was really hard to pick something to screenshot in this story about K-pop from the Pudding. It’s about K-pop and its history, told largely from a first-person perspective by Minji Kim and Eunice Lee: