Numlock News: July 30, 2026 • Aquiry, Ivory, Eurydice

Jul 30, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Diamonds

De Beers could sell for $1 billion, a steep decline for the diamond monopoly once valued at $18 billion. As it stands, the leading bid for the Anglo American subsidiary is from Global Diamond Consortium, which is a group that includes the governments of Namibia and Angola, which would pay $750 million upfront and then $250 million later. The transaction would be subject to negotiations with Botswana, which owns 15 percent of De Beers, and also has a 50 percent interest in the joint Debswana, which produces most of the diamonds that come from Botswana. The carrying value of De Beers was down to $2.3 billion as recently as February.

Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.com

Greek Myth Movie

While The Odyssey dominated the box office this past weekend, the live capture of the Broadway hit Hadestown was released in cinemas as Hadestown: The Musical, and made $10.2 million domestically across a little under 2,000 screens. Though overshadowed by the other mythological movie about an Achaean legend, that is good for the best-ever opening for a Broadway live capture at the box office, edging out the $10.1 million made by Hamilton, which topped out at $16.2 million domestically.

Brian Welk, IndieWire

Limited Edition Minis

Excavations at the Hohle Fels Cave in southwest Germany have uncovered a magnificent find: two 40,000-year-old carved birds made out of mammoth ivory. Their dimensions are tiny, at 2 x 1 x 0.5 cm, and are the smallest discovered so far, containing rich detail. They are of similar age, were discovered 1.5 meters from each other and may have even been carved by the same person. One figure is complete and appears to depict a brooding bird, but the other appears to be unfinished and has an outstretched wing. While exciting for archaeology, the find has presumably sent the miniature painting, modeling and tabletop wargaming communities into a tizzy — drastically pushing back the history of their hobby, cementing the recreational act of making little guys as a cornerstone of the human creative experience and presumably launching intense internecine arguments as to the species of the birds in question and whether the specific size of these ice age models indicates a fundamental human predisposition to either the 1:32 (one gauge) or 1:22.5 (“G scale”) scale.

Janna Eberhardt, University of Tübingen

Landslide

A new database developed by researchers at the University of Washington maps landslide risk across the entire United States and rates 128 million buildings based on landslide susceptibility. According to the analysis, 6.5 million people live in a landslide-prone region; the regions of Appalachia and the West Coast are at the most significant risk, containing about 80 percent of the people vulnerable to landslides. About 20 percent of the land in the United States is prone to landslides, though just two percent of the population live in them.

William Poor, University of Washington

Link

On July 3, the Link mission was launched into orbit, intending to send a satellite to NASA’s Swift gamma-ray telescope, which can push the instrument into a higher orbit to avoid a fiery re-entry and ensure an extended life for the spacecraft. It’s a rescue mission that has the dual purposes of prolonging the service of a satellite that lacks a propulsion system, while also serving as a proof-of-concept mission and tech demonstration for the commercial satellite servicing industry, a high-risk but high-reward mission. That risk, evidently, is real; the Link satellite has experienced issues with altitude control and an investigation has attributed the problem to two of the satellite’s three reaction wheels not operating as intended. Regardless of the outcome, NASA is already pleased with the results.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Aquiry

Researchers flew a plane equipped with lidar imaging equipment over 4,497 square kilometers of Brazil’s Southwest Amazon, and detected 396 new earthworks in the region, indicating that the area as a whole might contain as many as 24,000 to 30,000 in total. The geoglyphs spotted are a signature of the Aquiry civilization that existed there between 600 BCE and 850 CE. Based on this data, the researchers estimate that at the civilization’s apparent peak around 100 to 300 CE, there were potentially three million people living there, in an area about 183,000 square kilometers.

Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Scientific American and Julia Vaz, Science

Phones

For the first time on record, more Americans support a ban on students using cellphones during the entire school day than oppose it, with 48 percent of respondents backing a ban and just 43 percent opposing one, down from 53 percent opposed and 36 percent in favor as of 2024. Support for a ban on middle and high school students using cellphones during just class is considerably higher, at 77 percent in favor and 18 percent opposed.

Jeffrey Gottfried, Pew Research Center

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Numlock News: July 29, 2026 • Allulose, Betelgeuse, Jaguar

Jul 29, 2026

By Walt Hickey

FIFA

FIFA has, over the course of its history, been the Manhattan Project of corruption, pushing the boundaries of what is possible and weaponizing what grifters from just a generation earlier considered only theoretical. That legacy may very well continue as FIFA announced that it is looking to create a new entity: FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), within which the global soccer governing body would place the revenue-generating enterprises like media rights, ticket sales and sponsorships. FIFA would then sell a 21 percent stake of that company at a $20 billion valuation, which would lead to $4.2 billion in cash flowing immediately and directly into FIFA coffers and then presumably immediately and indirectly to god only knows where.

Eben Novy-Williams, Sportico

Unpublished

The billion-dollar AI labs are being remarkably stingy at participating in the scientific publication process that made their entire industry possible, a new study has found. After identifying 317 AI companies that existed from 1998 to 2025 valued at over $1 billion each, those top-flight AI unicorn companies accounted for just one in every 1,000 AI papers published in 2025. Over half of the startups never produced a single qualifying paper out of 1,389 peer-reviewed publications and 688 preprints, and only 24 firms — 7.6 percent — produced any highly-cited papers.

Celina Zhao, Science

Sugar

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a proposed class-action lawsuit over the sugar content of Chobani yogurt may proceed. The company advertised some of its yogurt as sugar-free, but the suit alleges that Chobani Zero Sugar yogurt actually contained four grams of allulose, a naturally occurring sweetener that the litigants contend is a sugar. Chobani argues that FDA regulation listed just glucose, fructose, lactose and sucrose as sugars, while the more expansive definition might include all monosaccharides.

Jonathan Stempel, Insurance Journal

Trek

A jaguar named Gaspar has smashed the record for dispersal of a tagged jaguar, traveling 2,122 kilometers from the time his tracking collar was fitted in November 2024 to when the collar stopped transmitting locations a year later. By comparison, the previous record for a tagged jag was 60 to 100 kilometers.

Joshua Rapp Learn, New Scientist

Streams

According to data from Nielsen, streaming television rose to 48.6 percent of total television watch time in May, up from 44.8 percent in May of last year. YouTube achieved a platform-best 13.8 percent of total watch time, up from 10.4 percent in May 2025. Thanks to the success of The Boys and a number of NBA and WNBA games, Amazon’s Prime Video saw a 25 percent year-over-year increase, good for 4.5 percent of total watch time in the month.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Rathlin

Rats can wipe out fragile bird populations on islands, and as a result, nearly 1,000 islands have attempted some form of invasive rodent eradication effort. These can be successful, but it’s especially challenging to kill invasive populations of vermin when there’s permanent human settlement on an island — as was the case for Rathlin Island, a 14-square-kilometer island that is home to Northern Ireland’s largest seabird colony, but also hosts invasive ferrets and rats that killed those birds. An initial effort to wipe out the ferrets required 450 traps set around the island, and as of March, the requisite two years have passed for the island to be certified ferret-free. The rats were a much bigger problem, as while there were just 98 ferrets, there were an estimated 10,000 rats. Thus began a massive effort involving 7,000 bait stations placed at 50-meter intervals all over Rathlin starting in September 2024. As far as people know, the last rat was killed in June 2025; if all proceeds as hoped, Rathlin might be declared rat-free next June.

Clare Wilson, New Scientist

Lydia?

Betelgeuse is the massive red supergiant that may be seen in the shoulder of the constellation Orion, and it’s long beguiled astronomers. Lately, that interest has come from the cyclical brightening and darkening of the star, which has spawned speculation that there might be a smaller companion star and that the red supergiant is indeed in a binary system. A paper published in February led to the announcement that Hubble observations indicated there was a possible second star passing in front of Betelgeuse once every six years, and new data from the SPHERE/ZIMPOL instrument of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope now appears to confirm it with a study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The second star, now termed Betelgeuse B, was spotted in data from December 2024, when the companion star would be at maximum separation from the known star.

Adam Kovac, Scientific American

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Numlock News: July 28, 2026 • Smilodon, Empress, Cosmic Lighthouse

Jul 28, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Emmys

The Emmy Awards are actually controlled by two separate organizations that have, for decades, been embroiled in an at-times acrimonious East Coast/West Coast feud. The Primetime Emmys are overseen by the Los Angeles-based Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, or the TV Academy, while the New York-based National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, or NATAS, oversees the Daytime Emmys, Sports Emmys, Children’s & Family Emmys, the News & Documentary Emmys, International Emmys and regional Emmys. ATAS, which has managed to get its show on an actual telecast, is the more well-heeled organization, with revenues over $53.5 million last fiscal year, compared to the $9.8 million in revenue for NATAS. Lately, things have been on the calmer side, so the waters are once again being tested for a possible reunification.

Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter

Casting

China’s microdramas are full of AI, with 95 percent of the 128,000 microdramas released in the first quarter of the year relying on the technology in some capacity. This has already led to some issues, with roughly 700 AI-related face theft cases over the past three years hitting Guangzhou’s Internet Court. To handle the demand for AI assets in a way that keeps things out of the courts, online platforms are paying people to license their likeness for AI-generated video content. ActID, one such company, has 300 clients licensing their images to AI production, with two AI drama productions licensing those faces so far and paying 99 to 500 yuan ($15 to $74) per episode.

Kinling Lo and Viola Zhou, Rest of World

Smilodon

Saber-tooth tigers, or Smilodon fatalis, went extinct about 12,000 years ago, though many specimens have been trapped in tar pits, which facilitates interesting research across hundreds of samples. Researchers analyzed 3,722 vertebrae from 849 adults and found lots of congenital deformities, including 48 fused vertebrae, 32 incompletely developed vertebral arches and three spinal nerve tumors. That last one is interesting; that would imply that among the Smilodon found in La Brea’s tar pits, 353 per 100,000 had the tumors, which are ordinarily remarkably rare. By comparison, that number is less than one in 100,000 for humans. What this indicates is that, as the population hit a bottleneck from which it never recovered, there were lengthy years of inbreeding among the population that led to the malformations.

Taylor Mitchell Brown, Science

Influential

Historically, brands that cut deals with social media influencers would aim high and work their way down the food chain, but the development of “advocacy programs” is enabling companies to find legions of people with relatively small followings who are one $10 gift card away from shilling their wares. According to Emarketer, influencers with fewer than 20,000 followers accounted for 19.5 percent of the total influencer marketing spend in 2021, a figure that is up to 45 percent of campaign spend as of 2026.

Katie Deighton, The Wall Street Journal

Imperial

A new poll from Nikkei and TV Tokyo found that 84 percent of Japanese respondents approved of allowing female emperors. The issue has come up, as there are just a few eligible men remaining in the line of succession, and for years, advocates of modernization have proposed either allowing women to inherit the Chrysanthemum Throne or at least allowing a son to inherit the title of emperor through their mother, currently not allowed. All told, 25 percent supported female emperors but not female-lineage emperors, 59 percent supported both female emperors and female-lineage emperors, and just eight percent opposed both. This comes after a revision to Imperial House Law that allows male-lineage male descendants from former imperial branch families to be adopted into the imperial family, a move that itself was supported by just 42 percent of respondents.

Nikkei Asia

Lighthouses

A new paper argues that while lots of signal-hunting for alien civilizations has focused on seeking out femtosecond lasers in high-energy bursts, perhaps it makes more sense to look for pulsing interstellar beacons instead. As it stands, our current astronomical surveys would not pick this up; any such beacon broadcasting at less than a nanosecond burst of light would not be seen by any SETI survey, except the PANOSETI project, which would be too low-resolution to capture such a “cosmic lighthouse.” The proposed project to search the local stellar neighborhood for such a beacon would involve a qCMOS detector, GPUs and diffractive-refractive lenses, with a one-meter telescope capable of detecting a 100 MW laser with a 10-microsecond pulse within 20 parsecs.

Andy Tomaswick, Universe Today

Photobiology

While chlorophyll understandably gets a lot of the attention, there are, in fact, many photosensitive proteins that science has become very interested in as of late, particularly as it relates to how animals register the length of day and when they ought to embark on important life events like migration. Opsins are photosensitive proteins that respond instantly to sunlight, and as of about 25 years ago, scientists thought they only contributed to sight. But beyond vision, opsins also govern lots of different behaviors ranging from body temperature to growth. While light-sensitive cells in the retina have understandably attracted most of the scientific attention, three other light-reactive proteins (melanopsin, encephalopsin and neuropsin, found in the retina, brain, skin, immune system and blood vessels) have recently become of significant interest.

Emily Laber-Warren, Knowable Magazine

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Numlock News: July 27, 2026 • Vikings, Packers, Raiders

Jul 27, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Buff Right Out

The Odyssey has made $639.6 million worldwide, of which $284.4 million was made domestically, $353.2 million abroad, and $140 million from IMAX. Still, a controversy has emerged: Universal contracted with the nonprofit Värmlands Vikingcenter in Sweden to borrow their boat Glad av Gillberga as one of the escort vessels in the Ithacan flotilla depicted in the film, paying a rental fee of $41,000. It’s impossible to spoil a 3000-year-old story, but needless to say, the boats in The Odyssey have a rather bad go of it, and according to the nonprofit, the hull was damaged, prompting the company to invoice Universal $6,000 for repairs. Universal says they’ve paid it; the Vikings dispute that charge. That said, from my limited nautical knowledge, any boat repair that cost a mere $6,000 will go down in history as the cheapest possible problem to ever need attention on a boat.

Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper and Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Packers

The Green Bay Packers are the sole publicly owned team in the NFL, and as a result, provide an unprecedented peek into the finances of the secretive sports juggernaut. Interestingly, the Packers reported a rare operating loss during the 2025 season of $1.1 million, down from an $83.8 million profit; the management had rather good reasons for the loss, and the answer is “Micah Parsons is an expensive gentleman to employ.” National revenue for the team — the NFL socialism — hit $453.2 million, up 4.8 percent, implying gross national revenue of $14.5 billion.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Checks

The usage of checks has declined sharply in the United States, but people are still using them for big purchases. In 2000, there were 42.6 billion checks written, good for 150 checks per American, with a total value of $40.3 trillion, indicating a typical check being for an amount less than $1,000. By 2024, there were only 9.2 billion checks written, only about 27 checks per person on average, but the total value was still rather high at $24.5 trillion, indicating the average check was for about $2,600. There may be change on the horizon, as the Federal Reserve is considering leaving the check processing business, which presents a possible phase-out moment for checks.

Jay L. Zagorsky, The Conversation

Museum

The Van Gogh Museum teamed up with researchers to figure out if visitor behavior should lead them to better layout decisions. The team randomly selected 25,000 out of 1.5 million visits to the museum from 2019 to 2021, and ascertained the visitor’s location and their progression through the museum based on their progression through the audio guide. The data contained some interesting information, not the least of which was that congestion led to engagement; when lots of people were looking at something, that made people passing by want to look at it themselves.

Mureji Fatunde-Iloeje, Ars Technica

Syria

A new study published in Heritage assessed satellite imagery of archaeological sites in Syria to determine the extent of looting and damage over the course of the civil war that gripped the country from 2011 to 2024. From 2011 to 2016, 13 percent of sites were looted, though from 2015 to 2025 fully 59 percent of sites were looted. One issue was the development of mechanized looting; bulldozers would scrape a site, looters would raid what was turned over, and the bulldozers would hit it again and again in order to dredge up valuable artifacts despite annihilating the site. Another issue that emerged was that the same kinds of locations that were advantageous for ancient settlements — accessibility, abundance of nearby resources, a solid view of the surroundings — were also valuable qualities for a military encampment during the war.

Amy Olson, Dartmouth College

Cleaning Robots

Chinese manufacturers account for 70 percent of the global market for household cleaning robots, a milestone cemented at the end of last year when the company that created the Roomba and essentially invented the category, the U.S.-based iRobot, was bought out of bankruptcy by a Chinese firm. Roborock is the biggest player, with a global market share of 27 percent as of late last year.

Kohei Fujimura, Nikkei Asia

LeBron James

Basketball superstar LeBron James has decided to take his talents to the Schuylkill, having elected to join the Philadelphia 76ers for their forthcoming season at an astonishing salary of $7.95 million over two years, or $3.88 million this season, 2.4 percent of the salary cap. This meagre pay is unprecedented for a player of LeBron’s talents: His 70.9 weighted wins above replacement over the past three years is the best ever for a player getting 2.4 percent or lower of the cap. The generally understood reason he’s playing so well for so cheap is that James, 42, is pursuing a ring with the kind of tenacity ordinarily only possessed by Sauron, in an attempt to surpass the number of championships won by Michael Jordan to advance his bid to be the greatest of all time.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

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Numlock Sunday: Fola Akinnibi on what's beneath New York's facade

Jul 26

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