Numlock News: October 17, 2025 • Toads, Kryptos, Nuclear Waste Repository

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Toads

A new study sought to find out the deal with toads, and it delivers. Toads are now on all six continents, but emerged first in South America about 61 million years ago. Based on the study — which analyzed DNA from 124 species — the animal didn’t spread to the Old World through the previously believed land bridge that at one point connected modern Alaska to Russia. Instead, it crossed directly from South America to Africa, either by hitching a ride across the Atlantic on mats of vegetation or, more interestingly, migrating through Antarctica when it had a warmer climate and was connected to South America 30 million years ago. This last bit is not as crazy as “toads crossed Antarctica to make it from South America to Africa” sounds, as there were frog fossils discovered in Antarctica in 2020. The real neat bit is the evolutionary kick start to that migration: poison. There was a rapid rise in the number of new species 33.5 million years ago, which is incidentally exactly when they evolved the parotoid gland that secretes antipredator goo.

Phie Jacobs, Science

Kryptos

Kryptos is a famous work of art on the campus of the CIA headquarters in Virginia, consisting of four encrypted passages carved into steel as an invitation to attempt to decrypt it. While three of the four messages encoded in the copper have been solved, the fourth one remained uncracked. The sculptor has now announced plans to auction the text of the passage and other papers with an expected hammer price between $300,000 and $500,000. Well, a pair might have found an innovative solution: papers in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution, which isn’t exactly the manner in which the artist intended it to be solved. While this might cause the eventual sale price of the solution to fall substantially, I don’t know, man, it’s right there in the CIA motto: you know truth, and the truth shall make it free.

John Schwartz, The New York Times

Bury

One proposed solution to climate change is the relatively low-tech idea of wood vaulting: cutting down trees and then burying the remaining wood underground, specifically just deep enough that the microbes that consume fallen wood and release the carbon within can’t survive. Biomass burial could lead to more than 12 billion tons of carbon sequestered annually, which would be good for 0.35 degrees Celsius, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience. It’s poetic — burning long-buried forests got us into this mess after all — but also would not exactly involve clear-cutting the forests of the world to save our own skin. Globally, trees in logging-focused forests take up 170 billion tons of carbon a year, 14 billion tons of which end up in wood. As long as that wood — plus the sawmill debris, the branches cut ahead of processing and the eventual wood — ends up buried, we’ve come out ahead.

Syris Valentine, Scientific American

Spooky

A new survey found that horror is the most polarizing movie genre, with 22 percent of respondents loving it, 28 percent liking it, 23 percent disliking it and 22 percent hating it. That “hate” figure is three times the level of the nearest runners up: a three-way tie between the western, fantasy and science fiction genres. The most-loved genre is comedy, which was loved by 46 percent of respondents and liked by 43 percent. This study is fascinating because the results could not be more opposed to what the box office is telling us. Horror movies regularly post amazing returns on investment and possess a dedicated fanbase that shows up to the movie theater. On the other hand, the major studio comedy is completely dead and buried because nobody goes to see them anymore, and you can barely get a romcom greenlit in 2025 because they tend to bomb badly. If anything, it shows that polarization can be an asset; action, adventure and drama have looted the corpse of the studio comedy, which is why every action or adventure film is snarky and funny now, and plenty of dramas are dramedies.

Taylor Orth, YouGov

We Considered Ourselves To Be A Powerful Culture

After two decades of work, a $10 billion vitrification plant built to seal radioactive waste in glass at the polluted Hanford Plant in Washington state has come online. The Hanford plant produced the plutonium pits that served as the basis of American nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. However, the manufacturing effort resulted in 325 million liters of liquid waste that was stored in 177 carbon steel tanks, many of which have rather understandably corroded given the sludge within. This new plant aims to mix 5500 liters of nuclear waste with molten silicate to create one inert log of glass, which can be stored much more effectively than the current arrangement.

Science

Analysis

When researchers want to find chemicals from a predetermined list in the systems of animals under study, they use a technique called targeted analysis. Improvements to the emerging techniques of non-targeted analysis — where blood or tissue samples are screened for a broader array of chemicals — have caught on, and have been able to track the PFAS chemicals causing mysterious problems in alligators who live in the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. The new technology has also helped narrow down the origin of sick and dead sea lions off the coast of California, even after the elimination of DDT from the food chain. That latter study of sea lion blubber found 194 halogen-based chemicals, including DDT, in marine mammals in the Southern California Bight. It’s believed these some of these chemical come from undiscovered containers of DDT and DDT byproducts that were dumped off Santa Catalina Island and had begun to leak.

Lela Nargi, Knowable Magazine

Bricks

A startup working on industrial heat batteries has linked up with an unlikely partner — an oil company — in its quest to commercialize its carbon-free alternative battery. Holmes Wester Oil Corp uses gas-fired boilers in its oil recovery system, but has replaced one of them with Rondo Energy’s battery. It is a 100-megawatt-hour solar array used to heat up clay bricks with electricity. This heat is eventually used to power a boiler that forces oil out of the ground. As a result, the oil company avoids 13,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, and the clay battery company gets a pretty fascinating guinea pig.

Michelle Ma, Bloomberg

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Numlock News: October 16, 2025 • Bayeux Tapestry, Chicago Rat Hole, Three-Spined Stickleback

By Walt Hickey

Scams

Scam texts have become an enormously lucrative industry, with criminal organizations operating out of China reaping over $1 billion in the past three years. The volume of scam messages claiming that the recipient has a past-due toll payment is 3.5 times higher than it was in January 2024; Americans reported getting 330,000 such toll scam messages in a single day, according to Proofpoint. The “innovation” behind the scam is a new trick allowing criminals to take a stolen card number volunteered by a mark, attach that to a Google or Apple Wallet in Asia, then share it with co-conspirators in the U.S. to make purchases.

Robert McMillan, The Wall Street Journal

Heat

A new study found that the three-spined stickleback, a species of fish the size of a paperclip living in the temperate northern waters of Germany, was able to develop a resilience to extreme heat under laboratory conditions. Furthermore, the offspring of those fish also showed some of that resilience. The researchers took 285 wild specimens and put a control group in a tank that modeled the temperature variations of their general environment. They then put a second group in a tank that endured a 14-day extreme heatwave, and finally a third group in a tank that endured successive heatwaves — first a minor one, then a major one. Researchers found that the double heatwave group was more primed to survive the second, more severe heat stress after being hit with the first one. The heatwave fish did lay fewer eggs overall, but their offspring grew quickly and would go on to lay more eggs than the control group.

Ashley Braun, bioGraphic

Speed

Forcing cars in metropolitan areas to go slower has profound effects on public health, but a new study argues that simply changing the speed limit might not be the most effective way to attain those improvements. The push for lower speed limits came from research that discovered a 37 percent decrease in fatalities when Milan pushed a 30-kilometer-per-hour speed limit in the city. The limit only added about 34 seconds per trip to motorists. However, a new study analyzing data out of Milan, Amsterdam and Dubai — 73 million telemetry points and 1.2 million street-level images — found that speed limits are not especially effective at reining in speed, finding that drivers only slowed 2 to 3 km/h when the limits dropped from 50 to 30 km/h. What really did the trick was narrowing the streets, which appeared more effectively coerce drivers to dial it back.

Carlo Ratti, Bloomberg

Cosmic Crisp

Honeycrisp apples are delicious, juicy, savory and a gigantic pain to grow and ship and distribute. Previous popular varieties of apples were specifically bred to thrive in the rough-and-tumble agricultural supply chain, with taste coming in a distant second. That’s not the case for Honeycrisps. As a result, the price of a Honeycrisp has shot up to about $70 per carton tray of apples, well above the $25 to $35 band that most varieties end up on. They have to be hand-clipped from the trees — cutting down productivity — and they have a poor shelf life compared to hardier rivals. That being said, there is help on the horizon: the Cosmic Crisp, which has seen production increase 800 percent over the past year alone. It is a more durable cousin produced by crossbreeding the Honeycrisp and the Enterprise apple.

Amira McKee, The Wall Street Journal

Lights

Lighting fishing nets has been demonstrated in the past to reduce bycatch of sea turtles and sharks, but it’s faced impediments to implementation: the lights are heavy, fishers find them annoying and the batteries don’t last long enough. However, a new study out of Arizona State University developed solar-powered lights that function as buoys, the same to the usual buoys attached to fishing net float lines. They were able to stay active for five days without sunlight and flashed LEDs, and it worked. Sea turtle catch rates were 63 percent lower in the solar-powered illuminated nets compared to the control nets. The fishing boats with the solar nets even caught more of the desired yellowtail, too.

Arizona State University

Bayeux

The British Museum is getting the Bayeux Tapestry from France on a loan while the Bayeux Tapestry Museum is under renovation, and the expectations for attendance are massive. The tapestry will be on display in London from September 2026 to July 2027, and the museum is preparing for historic interest on par with the 1.7 million visitors who went to Treasures of Tutankhamun in 1972 or the 850,000 who went to The First Emporer: China’s Terracotta Army in 2007. The tapestry has some challenges associated with it. Not only will it have to be displayed at a 60-degree angle rather than hung vertically, but light levels must be kept low. It has also got 24,204 stains, 16,445 wrinkles, 9,646 gaps and 30 non-stabilized tears. The hope is to display it in a single line rather than a U-shape, which will allow readers to enjoy what is effectively the most famous British comic book in what is effectively the most famous British crowd formation, a 25-minute queue.

Martin Bailey, The Art Newspaper

Rat Hole

Moving on to American art, scientists can report that the beloved Chicago “rat hole” — a depression made in wet concrete decades ago by an unlucky rodent, forming an uncanny void in a Chicago sidewalk — was nearly certainly formed by a squirrel, not a rat. The original origin of the rat hole was thought to be a dead brown rat dropped by a bird of prey, but a new analysis of the site compared the iconic attraction to 50 museum specimens of the eight rodent species of Chicago. It found that there’s a 98.67 percent chance it was a squirrel, indeed one that likely fell from a tree.

Celina Zhao, Science

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Numlock News: October 15, 2025 • Hamilton, Wolves, Satellites

By Walt Hickey

We Still Have The Banks, We’re In The Same Spot

Hamilton secured its highest-ever grossing week on Broadway, bringing in $4,042,906 from attendance of 10,752 people. That’s interesting because we aren’t even in the holiday season yet, which tends to be when shows start posting their best numbers as tourists flock to New York; the previous high gross was set the week of Christmas in 2018. Two factors contributed to the new milestone: the first was the return of Leslie Odom Jr. in the role of Aaron Burr and the second was an increase in the average Hamilton ticket price from $348 to $376. Broadway is humming right now, as shows debut ahead of that highly lucrative holiday season and replace those that folded shortly after the Tonys.

Caitlin Huston, The Hollywood Reporter

Cyber Fraud

The United States has charged the chairman of Prince Group, a Cambodian conglomerate, with operating a massive cyber fraud operation, seizing 127,271 bitcoin worth around $15 billion in the process. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged the chairman with wire fraud conspiracy and operating a money laundering scheme, alleging the use of forced labor in Cambodia to scam victims across the world in what’s become known as “pig butchering” schemes. This fraud scheme was credited by one study for causing $75 billion in losses from January 2020 to February 2024.

Patricia Hurtado, Bloomberg

Satellite

Researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Maryland were able to receive unencrypted communications involving satellites using simple off-the-shelf equipment. This includes samples of calls and messages sent over the T-Mobile cellular network, data from in-flight WiFi browsing, communications from utilities, and law enforcement communications. The research looked at the 15 percent of geostationary satellites whose signals could be picked up from San Diego, and the paper argues that this is a serious vulnerability for years to come. The most surprising and chilling element was the researcher's ability to accomplish this without anything too sophisticated or any equipment from the cloak-and-dagger crowd; they needed just a $185 satellite dish, a $140 roof mount, a $195 motor and a $230 tuner card to do it.

Andy Greenberg and Matt Burgess, Wired

Neophobia

A massive new study analyzed neophobia — fear of new things — in birds, drawing on the efforts of 129 collaborators from 82 institutions in 24 countries to study the reactions of 1,439 birds across 136 species to novel objects. They found that grebes and flamingos had the highest levels of neophobia, while falcons and pheasants exhibited the least neophobia and would engage with the unknown items readily. Overall, two patterns emerged. First, migratory birds exhibited higher levels of neophobia (the paper argues that a general unease around the unfamiliar might be evolutionary advantageous for birds who encounter so many different environments and possible threats). However, species with narrower diets also had higher neophobia, because if it couldn’t possibly be your familiar food, why on Earth would you bother messing with it?

Anglia Ruskin University

Comics

Sales of comics and graphic novels hit $1.935 billion in 2024, up 73 percent from 2019. Dollar sales in comic book shops were up 13.3 percent. However, sales in conventional book stores actually slowed a bit, thanks to a 17.1 percent drop in unit sales for manga, which has underpinned a lot of the growth in bookstore sales of comics. Despite the dip, manga numbers and digital distribution are still doing an excellent job of propelling Gen Z consumers into comics. Many of the established players have capitalized on this demographic by re-releasing classic arcs of their comics in more readable paperback editions, like DC’s Absolute line.

Brigid Alverson, ICV2

Up The Wolves

Italy has sought to preserve and reintroduce wildlife in forested parts of the country, including Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park. While the last Marsican bear in the Sibyllines was shot in 1870, the species has been reintroduced since, with a population of only around 60 animals. All of the subspecies’ reproductive females live in Molise National Park, and all the males are in the protected forests around it. It hasn’t always been easy going to reintroduce them — Italy is very densely populated — but the efforts have paid off. As of 2021, there are 2,400 wolves in Italy, with about a sixth of them living in a mere 5,180 square kilometer section of the Central Apennines — one-sixtieth of the land area in the country where wolves played a famously crucial part in founding Rome.

Hillary Rosner, bioGraphic

Lead

A Consumer Reports lab analysis of 23 protein powders and ready-to-drink shakes found that within a single serving, 70 percent of them contained at least 120 percent of the level of lead that food safety experts said was safe to consume in a day. Three products also exceeded the threshold of concern for cadmium and inorganic arsenic. Two of the protein powders contained 1,200 to 1,600 percent of the level of concern for lead, which was 0.5 micrograms per day, with another two having 400 percent to 600 percent of that lead level. The FDA does not review, approve or test supplements like protein powders before sold, and regulations don’t require manufacturers to prove the product is safe.

Paris Martineau, Consumer Reports

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Numlock News: October 14, 2025 • Rum, Gold, Secret Keys

By Walt Hickey

Gold

The price of gold is now north of $4,000 an ounce, which is leading people into some once dead career trajectories, including prospector, assayer and old coot. While most of the rivers of the United States were thoroughly and aggressively panned during the various gold rushes that have defined the business cycle of American mining, some people have been lured back into these rivers by the sky-high price of the metal. The Big Thunder Gold Mine, which dates back to the 1874 Black Hills Gold Rush, offers panning lessons and sells five-gallon buckets of dirt collected on site for $55 each; sales are up 50 percent year over year. The real motherlode is not in the rivers, of course, but in the streams, as people are making a lot of money from posting about their foolish gold-finding quests for rather substantial and lucrative audiences. One prospecting influencer family has racked up 430,000 followers and earned $30,000 from the social media business, vastly more than they’ve pulled out of any riverbed.

Te-Ping Chen, The Wall Street Journal

Rum Fish

In 1907, the U.S. Fish Commission’s USS Albatross ventured from San Francisco to the Philippines and collected 79,000 specimens of fish in the bays and reefs of the island nation over the next three years, documenting 117 new species in the process. The ship was the first one built purposefully for research and preserved the fish collected in high-proof rum. It was a stroke of luck for researchers because the formaldehyde ordinarily used in the era damages DNA, but rum does not — a fact that I am going to tell everyone on my next beach vacation. Now, a team of researchers is analyzing DNA samples from the historic specimens collected by the Albatross, and has found that the genetic diversity of three studied species has actually declined by four to six percent, well outpacing the baseline two percent genetic diversity loss across 140 species of fish found in a 2014 meta-analysis.

Erik Stokstad, Science

Volcanos

A new study in Communications Earth & Environment demonstrates a strategy that allows researchers to determine the exact position of magma or gas within a volcano’s conduits in three dimensions. This may help forecast volcanic eruptions long-term. Magma rising through the crust toward a volcano can cause tremors as the high pressure fractures rocks and gases escaping from magma. The researchers’ analysis of the Oldoinyo Lengai volcano in Tanzania over the course of 18 months led to the discovery of two different kinds of tremor, one which originated five kilometers down and one near the base of the volcano. That particular volcano is interesting because the magma there is relatively cool — 550 degrees Celsius, well under the typical 650 to 1,200 degrees Celsius that is typical — and is more fluid.

Kathrin Voigt, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Quantum

The cryptography world has been steadily preparing for a reality in which useful quantum computers actually exist, a technological advance that would make computing significantly more efficient. However, in doing so, it also makes existing cryptographic standards obsolete and easily overcome by the new equipment. As it stands, less than half of TLS connections made within Cloudflare’s network and 18 percent of Fortune 500 networks support quantum-resistant connections, but one group — the engineers behind the Signal Protocol, which powers end-to-end encryption for many chat apps — has been working to make their encryption fully quantum-resistant. The latest upgrade adds the ML-KEM-768 implementation of the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm, or KEM, which involved overcoming a fascinating technical challenge of adding a 1,000-byte key to each message without running into bandwidth problems. It is a vastly larger key than the 32-byte current implementation.

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica

Hunts

A new study published in the journal Antiquity pored over satellite imagery of the Andean highlands of Chile, discovering dozens of once-rarely spotted traps that Andean hunters used to capture animals. These are large structures built by hunter-gatherers who constructed stone walls that slowly converged and funneled pursued animals into a pit trap. Prior to this study, there were fewer than a dozen such traps known across the pre-Hispanic Andes. However, analyzing 4,600 square kilometers of imagery turned up 76 new examples of the chacu traps, in addition to 800 previously undiscovered small-scale settlements and at least 100 more traps further to the south of the Camarones Valley. The average length of the long wall in the traps was 181 meters, the shorter arm was 97 meters and the landscape was occupied from at least 6000 BC to 1700 AD.

Garry Shaw, The Art Newspaper

Burst

In July, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope spotted a gamma-ray burst 9 billion light-years from Earth called GRB 250702B. Most bursts last only a couple of minutes, but GRB 250702B was a monster, lasting 25,000 seconds (roughly 7 hours) and becoming the longest-known gamma-ray burst ever spotted. What the heck caused it is still in question; most long gamma-ray bursts are the result of a star collapsing into a black hole and launching out a jet in its death throes. The theory for GRB 250702B is that a pre-existing black hole made contact with a companion star and consumed it from the inside out, producing an ultra-long blast such as this one.

Jonathan O’Callaghan, New Scientist

VinFast

Vietnamese automaker VinFast reported selling 103,884 electric cars in the first nine months of the year in Vietnam, which is already outpacing what Toyota sells in the same country in an entire year. Last year, VinFast sold 87,000 EVs in the entire year, beating Toyota’s 66,578 predominantly internal combustion engine vehicles. Last year, 28 percent of sales were to Green and Smart Mobility, which is a taxi company under the Vingroup corporate umbrella, but it’s not clear how much of their 2025 sales were to the corporate cousin. VinFast appears to now be responsible for half of all cars sold in Vietnam; the latest data shows that 205,125 autos rolled off the lot in the first nine months, including trucks and buses.

Lien Hoang, Nikkei Asia

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