Numlock News: January 30, 2026 • Dali, Vegas, Troy

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Twins

A new study has gotten to the bottom of inherited mortality, finding that once deaths from external causes are accounted for, the genetic contribution to human life comes in around 55 percent. That would be about double the previous estimate. The study was based on twins, and does a solid job of recalibrating the weight upon which our ancestors affect the scales of life.

Walter Beckwith, Science

The Trojan Peace

Sing to me, oh muse of fair Troy, a peaceful place
Which was doing pretty solid I think, you know,
It turns out that decades of peace were good, and
Yeah that the archeological record is
Complicated. There are nine major layers with
Architectural reorganization, and
The record shows, if anything stable, coastal
Society, with only one massive moment
Of destruction in 2 3 5 0 B C E.

Stephan Blum, The Conversation

Francis Scott Key

Litigation over who owes what when it comes to the cargo ship Dali crashing into the Francis Scott Key bridge has hit the point where 1851 maritime law is entering the picture. The state of Maryland is seeking to prevent Synergy Marine from invoking the Shipowners’ Limitation of Liability Act. Generally, the shipowner’s limitation of liability is limited to the value of a ship, and the stipulated value of the Dali is $43.7 million. The argument gets down to what exactly the law means by “owner.” The state argues that Great Ocean Private Limited owns the boat and Synergy is just a manager. Before the crash, the boat was worth $90 million.

Insurance Journal

Snakes on a Train

A researcher who compiled reports on 22 years’ worth of king cobra incidents in the Western Ghats of India found 47 reports of the snake, with sightings ranging from villages to woodlands to towns. The statistical model found that while most of the sightings occurred in the precise ecological regions where one might find a cobra, five locations — including one in the railway station in the town of Goa — were conspicuously near a rail stop. This implies that either (a) the snakes are on a train and we should support the reptilian advocates of public transit, or (b) please stop bringing snakes on the train, guys.

Erik Stokstand, Science

Vegas

It turns out that making your lubricated casino experience into a series of extractive tolls has a consequence, as Las Vegas saw the fewest visitors in years. Vegas had 38.5 million visitors in 2025, down 7.5 percent from 2024. In December, the 3.1 million vistitors was down nine percent. Strip occupancy fell three percent, and revenue per available room was down eight percent. Anyway, the solution is obvious: add a fourth 0000 to the roulette wheel, that’ll do it.

Howard Stutz, The Nevada Independent

Toys

After three years of declining sales, toy sales were up globally by seven percent in dollar terms. Licensed toys were up 15 percent, rising to 37 percent of global toy sales. That rise was led by Pokémon, which is the top property in the world, followed by Hot Wheels, Barbie and Star Wars. All told, collectibles now account for 19 percent of total worldwide sales, up 32 percent.

Toy Book

Loyalty

Earlier this week, the most important announcement about the future of the American economy was made. No, not the Federal Reserve. Starbucks revealed the ultimate nature of its loyalty program, which claims 35.5 million members over the past three months. Launching on March 10, the loyalty program is careening towards the kind of tiered structure that conveys a Starbucks Lounge at JFK in a decade or so.

QSR Magazine

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Amanda Shendruk, the talented visual journalist behind the new newsletter Not-Ship. I am a longtime admirer of Shendruk’s work, her visuals are deeply cool, you should check out the newsletter.

Numlock Sunday: Amanda Shendruk on tackling uncertainty in a messy world

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Numlock News: January 29, 2026 • Cognac, Cambrian, Comics

By Walt Hickey

Diamond

Last year, the longtime intermediary in the American comics business — the single firm that connects all the myriad producers of comic books, from the Big Two to the smallest indie, to the legion of independent comic book stores that dot the country — filed for bankruptcy. Diamond Comic Distributors’ insolvency has caused reverberating problems across the industry, even well after its affairs were settled and its Chapter 11 became a Chapter 7. One big issue is the inventory: Diamond basically kept all the industry’s books in its warehouses on consignment for publishers big and small. When the distributor went under, that inventory became an asset that creditors had a claim on. It’s a whole lot of comics, $47,395,014 at book value according to a January 27 filing, worth some $113,737,037 at retail. What happens to that consignment inventory is a matter for the courts.

Milton Griepp, ICv2

Fossil

A site in China has produced a record of a remarkable ecosystem, with the 512-million-year-old fossil site dating to the Cambrian period. Found in a quarry in Hunan Province in 2021, scientists report that they have analyzed 8,681 fossils from 153 species at the site, of which 60 percent are new to science. It features 16 major groups of animals, many of which are soft-bodied.

James Woodford, New Scientist

Earth Too

A new planet called HD 137010 b, described in a paper published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, is exciting because of how much it resembles Earth. It’s got an orbit that is 355 days long, is about the size of our world and it’s got a bright star. The planet is 146 light-years away and was spotted by NASA’s Kepler space telescope in 2017. The star is a K-dwarf, and while the planet orbits at about the same distance as Earth, the star is 1000 degrees Celsius cooler than the sun. As a result, HD 137010 b probably gets less energy from its star than Mars gets from ours.

Elise Cutts, Science

Bingo

Nielsen data is in, and the biggest streaming show of 2025 was Bluey, which saw 45.2 billion minutes of viewing on Disney+, its second consecutive year at No. 1 on Nielsen’s chart. The second biggest show, Grey’s Anatomy, racked up 40.92 billion minutes across its 450-episode library, and Stranger Things was the third-biggest show with 39.95 billion minutes. Overall, U.S. viewers watched 16.7 trillion minutes of programming on streaming platforms in 2025, up 19 percent over 2024, the equivalent of 31.7 million years of linear time.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Cognac

The Cognac industry — based in Cognac, where they produce Cognac — is ripping up vines in its first coordinated removal effort since the 1990s as the industry deals with a downturn in demand. While we can’t call it a Bear Market (per European Union rules, it’s only considered one if the downturn originated in the Bear region of France), it’s not looking great: shipments fell to 141 million bottles, the lowest level since 2009, and consumption is projected to drop two percent annually through 2029. China’s brandy imports fell by 40 percent to 22 million liters in 2024 following a trade fight between the EU and China, which is not helping, and the trade group of producers is aiming to shrink acreage under cultivation by 13 percent.

Angelina Rascouet, Bloomberg

The Front Fell Off

Last month, Japan’s H3 rocket failed during launch, but did so in an exciting and interesting new way: the front fell off. The H3 rocket has had six successful launches across eight flights, and the pair of failures came during the first launch and this December launch. An analysis of the mission data found that the Michibiki 5 satellite, moored on the top of the rocket, was dislodged about a minute after the rocket released its payload shroud in the upper atmosphere. A rear-facing camera captured the ill-fated satellite as it broke off the rocket, which proceeded to continue upwards into a low-altitude orbit even as the satellite hurtled downwards. The second stage engine had lost 20 percent of its thrust, but because the front — a five-ton navigation satellite — had indeed fallen off, the rocket still managed to get into orbit, albeit an unsustainable one. Rocket science is obviously a rather difficult field of engineering, but ultimately, rockets are generally designed so the front does not fall off; it is nevertheless remarkable that orbit was still achieved despite the whoopsie-daisy.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Smellscapes

Historians and scientists attempting to document and recreate historical smells are using sophisticated sampling techniques as well as cutting-edge tech to identify and preserve aromas. One project, Odeuropa, developed a database of 2.5 million historical smell references, pulled from 43,000 images and 167,000 historical texts across seven European languages to help develop an understanding of odors over the ages. Other scientists catalog artifacts, historical sites and even mummies based on scent; the latter tend to smell woody, spicy and sweet according to one panel of scientists, owing to the chemicals used in preservation.

Kaja Šeruga, Knowable Magazine

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Numlock News: January 28, 2026 • Great Mongolian Road, Deep Ice Seismometer, Stratospheric Internet

By Walt Hickey

Innovation

One part of the economy that just won’t quit is the thriving sector of financial institutions offering liquidity options to legally innovative firms through cutting-edge technical flow management. Critics call this “crypto money laundering.” Whatever you call it, business is great: according to Chainalysis, crypto money laundering rose from $10 billion in activity in 2020 to $82 billion in 2025. Of that, $16.1 billion was in Chinese-language networks, which grew 7,325 times faster than legal centralized exchanges since 2020, and processed $44 million in illicit payments per day last year.

Sage D. Young, Sherwood News

Road Trip

A new study published in the Journal of Historical Geography documents the Great Mongolian Road, which was a major east-west caravan route through inner Asia. The study drew upon maps produced by the Japanese Imperial Army from 1873 to 1945, which in turn were compiled from Chinese imperial records from 1890 and Russian surveys conducted in 1884. While the maps didn’t match the territory perfectly, they do corroborate early accounts of the Great Mongolian Road collected in the early 20th century. They also confirm the existence of 50 nodes such as water sources, settlements, monasteries and landmarks, spaced at 24-kilometer intervals along the 1,215 kilometer route.

Sandee Oster, Phys.org

Golden

It has been six months since KPop Demon Hunters first entered the Top Movie Songs chart, and still the animated musical is dominating the top ten, with HUNTR/X’s “Golden” still No. 1 as of December after earning 95.5 million official U.S. streams and selling 19,000 downloads. In total, seven of the songs from the movie are on the chart, with “Soda Pop” coming in at No. 2 with 41.2 million streams and 5,000 downloads, and “How It’s Done,” “Your Idol,” “What It Sounds Like,” “Take Down” and “Free” making the list. The other songs in the top 10 are the title song from Wicked: For Good, the Shakira song from Zootopia and “Come On Up to the House” by Tom Waits from Wake Up Dead Man.

Kevin Rutherford, Billboard

Piggyback

The U.S. Geological Survey’s $1 million Deep Ice Seismometer project is attempting to put two seismometers at the bottom of two 2.5-kilometer deep holes in the ice of the South Pole. The water above is slowly freezing and will trap them far beneath the ice in the quietest place on Earth, where the noise from ocean waves, weather and traffic won’t get picked up. As a result, the seismometers will be able to pick up any earthquake on the planet above magnitude 5, and they just got their first hit off a 6.1 near Okinawa. The project was possible by piggybacking off of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which strung sensors long 86 boreholes and was planning a $37 million upgrade in 2020 when geophysicists asked if they could also drop something in the holes too. The machines must remain upright even as the ice freezes above them, and any more than three degrees of rotation renders them broken forever. One tilted 1.6 degrees but got nudged back in a stroke of luck. They should be fully frozen within the month.

Hannah Richter, Science

EVs

A new study out of the University of Michigan assessed the lifetime ownership costs of used vehicles bought in year three and driven until year 10, including insurance costs, repairs, maintenance and the value retained on the vehicle between purchase and sale. Overall, in the mid-sized SUV category, used electric vehicles offered a savings of $13,000 over a new version of that SUV with an internal combustion engine. Compared to a used version of the car with an internal combustion engine, a used vehicle offered lifetime savings of $10,000. The data was drawn from virtual vehicle models, monthly gas prices, electricity prices and Craigslist data of 260,000 listings of automobiles.

Matt Davenport, University of Michigan

Bears

In 1942, the 27,000-year-old remains of a 15-year-old boy were found in Arene Candide Cave in Italy. A new analysis of the remains of Il Principe confirms early suspicions that his death was the result of an animal attack. The cold case investigation determined that the perp was probably a bear, given the bite and claw marks, according to the study published in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences.

Sarah Novak, Scientific American

Stratospheric

There are still 2.2 billion people with limited or no access to the internet, often because they live in remote places. While satellite-based internet is increasingly available, it’s also often too expensive for parts of the developing world. Stratospheric internet, where the equipment is suspended from rigid airships or balloons, is still on the table in many places, even though large players like Alphabet have killed their projects in the area. The economics of high-altitude platform stations (HAPS) are pretty intriguing, given that it’s a lot cheaper to get a balloon 12 miles high than it is to get one to low-Earth orbit. World Mobile, a London-based telecom, is looking into high-altitude hydrogen-powered UAVs, planning a flight test of an antenna capable of delivering 200 megabits per second covering an area of more than 500 cell towers. If successful, it could supply 5.5 million Scots with high-speed internet for 40 million pounds per year, or about 60 pence (80 cents) per person per month.

Tereza Pultarova, MIT Technology Review

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Numlock News: January 27, 2026 • Dinosaur Footprints, Cameo, Mars

By Walt Hickey

Goodwill

One retailer that is doing just fine despite some feeling pinched wallets is Goodwill Industries, the largest thrift store chain in the world. It beat $7 billion in revenue in 2024 across its 3,400 stores, a seven percent increase year over year. Part of the appeal is the lower prices one gets from a secondhand shop; the other is the treasure hunt style of shopping in a store that can literally contain anything, given the six billion pounds of goods Goodwill receives as intake every year. The entire secondhand business is doing swell overall: Savers Value Village, a competitor with 300 stores, saw net sales grow 16 percent in its most recent quarter, while ThredUp reported revenue was up 34 percent last quarter.

Kim Bhasin and Sophia June, The New York Times

Cameo

Many actors have turned to the platform Cameo for a little extra cash, selling personalized videos or messages to fans. The platform saw a surge of actors join during the pandemic as work dried up in the performing arts fields, and now there are a little less than 3,000 actors on Cameo. A new analysis of 407,017 reviews for 4,777 actors on Cameo found a couple of neat trends. First up, gift-giving really is a big driver of this, as December accounts for 14 percent of all videos ordered annually. About half of the videos come in at between 30 and 90 seconds, but some go a bit longer. Nearly half are shouting out a birthday, with holiday greetings and pep talks accounting for about a quarter of the videos. When giving cameros for someone’s birthday, gifters often go for the nice, round ones. A person’s 40th birthdays were the most popular age for birthday-related recipients. People are generally pleased: 98.8 percent of reviews are five out of five.

Stephen Follows, StephenFollows.com

Malaria

Beating malaria has been a tall order, but recent accomplishments of medical science have made the disease easier to treat, even as the parasite responsible for the disease develops new strategies of survival. Two new malaria vaccines for kids — RTS,S/AS01 and R21/Matrix-M — have already prevented thousands of deaths since their introduction in 2023. Researchers are also learning new things about how malaria parasites invade cells. When it attacks a liver cell, it must briefly shed a dense surface protein, an action that makes it vulnerable to the immune system. An antibody called MAD21-101 can help block the disease from entering liver cells entirely. One worry, though, is that Plasmodium falciparum, which causes 90 percent of malaria cases, is developing sensitivity or resistance to artemisinin in 56 countries, which is central to malaria treatment worldwide.

Kwesi Akonu Adom Mensah Forson, The Conversation

Salute Your Shorts

Time spent watching short social videos is eating into what was once the most important time in anyone’s day: time spent watching television or movies. In 2022, Americans spent 10.8 hours per week watching social or creator videos and 21.2 hours per week watching television or movies. As of 2025, that’s shifted to 11 hours of social videos and 19.0 hours of watching television or movies. This is a devastating national shift; the typical American is losing the equivalent of one rewatch of Die Hard every week, and all they’re gaining from it is like a couple of minutes of clips from Game Changer episodes they’ve already seen and podcasts they don’t listen to.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Footprints

A new study describes a machine learning tool that was fed 1,974 dinosaur footprints, including not only a range of specimens across the history of dinosaurs but also modern birds. The study then identified eight features of shape variation that helped identify which dinosaur was responsible for the footprint. For context, there is a debate over whether some footprints from the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic are indeed birds, which would mean that birds existed 60 million years before their oldest known skeletons. Interestingly, this study found that those bird-like tracks were indeed more similar to modern and fossil birds than to any known dinosaur. They also made an app, DinoTracker, for researchers to use. This is personally important in my quest to identify what I hold to be a baby T. rex footprint in the concrete sidewalk outside my apartment in Queens, despite my many paleontological rivals insisting it’s “just a pigeon, dude.”

Gregor Hartmann, Tone Blakesley, Paige E. dePolo and Stephen L. Brusatte, PNAS

Museums

The latest survey of the 511 museum directors of the American Alliance of Museums points to persistent issues with attendance threatening balance sheets. A total of 50 percent of respondents reported fewer visitors than in 2019, and 29 percent reported declines in visits tied to overall weakened travel. A quarter of them said that their bottom lines are weaker than in 2019. While support from governments is down by 26 percent, the bright side is that federal funding accounts for only three percent. The real issue is that major donors are stingier, with foundation funding down 25 percent.

Dale Berning Sawa, The Art Newspaper

Mars

Earth’s “grand cycle” is a shift in the orbit of the Earth that has implications for climate. Essentially, over the course of 2.4 million years, Earth’s orbit elongates and shrinks. A new analysis simulated Earth’s orbit and found that if one removed Mars from the solar system, the grand cycle just disappears, as does another 100,000-year cycle of Earth’s eccentricity. When Mars’ simulated mass was increased, the cycles got shorter. Another eccentricity cycle, one that is 405,000 years, is governed more by Venus and Jupiter, and those remained intact.

Leah Crane, New Scientist

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Numlock News: January 26, 2026 • Hot Sauce, Fake Snow, Poison

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

The Housemaid

Paul Feig’s thriller The Housemaid, starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, has become a sleeper hit at the box office, climbing to $294.9 million at the global box office, surpassing Bridesmaids to become Feig’s top-grossing film. For an R-rated psychological thriller, that’s pretty great. The fact that there are still two built-in sequels ready to go is another perk, with the intention to shoot a sequel this year for a 2027 release. The movie has flown somewhat under-the-radar because it was released the same day as Avatar: Fire and Ash as counter-programming and has thus evaded the top spot at the box office.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Exploding Hot Sauce

A product liability suit is headed to court over a flawed batch of Lola’s Fine Salsa, which bubbled, exploded and fermented after purchase. The company alleges that its manufacturer, Ecoldeas, should be responsible for the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to pull the product off the shelves. Lola’s says that the out-of-pocket harm was about $525,000, including a billback from Walmart of nearly $155,000.

Ezra Amacher, Insurance Journal

Glasses

Japan’s eyewear shops have been an oasis for tourists visiting from countries where glasses are considerably more expensive. The average price for a pair of glasses in Japan was $141.49 in 2025, according to QY Research — significantly cheaper than the $178.22 average price in the United States and the $174.38 paid in Italy. The average price of eyeglasses in December was 23,303 yen (US$147) according to Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, 20 percent lower than five years earlier.

Misaki Morikawa, Nikkei Asia

Cat’s Cradle

Scientists have been able to get water to freeze into new kinds of exotic structures by pushing water to extremes of temperature and pressure. Your standard ice is termed Ih (hexagonal ice that forms naturally on Earth) and Ic (cubic ice that forms in high clouds). In bad news for Kurt Vonnegut fans, a new study published in Nature Materials reveals the creation of Ice XXI, a blocky crystal structure that develops in supercompressed water, seen only with an X-ray free-electron laser.

Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

Snow

The upcoming Olympics in Italy will feature lots of manufactured snow on the slopes, a feat of engineering that required organizers to create reservoirs of water in the Alps in order to ensure they had enough to coat the mountains. The organizing committee said on Friday that they have produced 1.6 million cubic meters of technical snow across the portfolio of venues, though that is still less than forecasted. The constructed basin at Livigno Snow Park was built to hold 200 million liters of water, which incidentally makes it one of the biggest reservoirs on the Italian side of the Alps. There, 50 snow guns produced 800 million liters of snow in about 300 hours.

Jennifer McDermott and Pat Graham, The Associated Press

Exoskeleton

A Vanderbilt University-designed exoskeleton system performed well in real-world trials, according to a new study where the equipment (produced by HeroWear) was tried over eight to 23 months at five distribution centers over 311,000 work hours. The Apex 2 exosuit saw strain and sprain injuries drop from 10.2 percent per 100 workers per year to 3.8 percent among its users, and decreased strain, sprain and lifting injuries by 62 percent. Back injuries account for 23 percent to 30 percent of workers’ compensation claims in the United States. The concern with this kind of equipment is often that it can shift injuries to other parts of the body, but that concern was not found to occur in these trials.

Insurance Journal

Poison

The 53 regional poison control centers of the United States are responsible for significant healthcare savings across the country. In the past 30 days, there have been 201,545 reported poisonings in the United States, and the poison control hotlines are very successful at providing treatment and diverting non-emergency cases away from hospitals. That has saved something like $3.1 billion annually in healthcare and productivity costs, according to a new report from RAND. For every dollar invested in poison control centers, American communities get $16.77 in benefits.

Shayna Korol, Vox

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