Numlock News: April 10, 2025 • Far Side, Petabyte, Ring Pop

Apr 10, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Who Squealed?

Three agricultural companies are being sued by a Minnesota lender in a suit accusing the defendants — large pig farming operations — of operating a billion-dollar check kiting scheme. The suit, which has made waves in agricultural circles, claims that the companies would routinely deposit checks between accounts to make it appear as if one had sufficient funds, a practice called check kiting. It claims the 3 companies would issue numerous checks to one another in identical amounts, many ranging from $800,000 to $990,000, just below the level that would invite regulatory scrutiny, faking a positive account balance that would compel that lender to pay the companies interest. This culminated in the discovery that the companies were $36 million in the hole. At immediate issue, though, is 110,000 piglets, owned and managed by the companies, which the lender wants a court-appointed receiver to take care of, given that they’re the key actual assets of the companies.

Clark Kauffman, Iowa Capitol Dispatch

Same Thing We Do Every Night, Pinky

A new study published in Nature details the efforts of over 100 scientists who managed to record the cellular activity and structure of a cubic millimeter of a mouse’s brain. This feat was the latest accomplishment of the $100 million MICrONS project. The density of neural tissue is remarkable, and the recording of even a small piece (less than 1 percent) of the full brain is massive, requiring 1.6 petabytes of data to store. The cubic millimeter contained 523 million neural connections across 200,000 neurons in a little tiny grain of tissue. The project has ambitions to map a whole mouse brain. While the potential is incredible to contemplate, funding for the NIH’s BRAIN initiative was cut by 40 percent last year and then another 20 percent last month, so you’ll have plenty of time to contemplate it; no rush.

Carl Zimmer, The New York Times

Vancouver

One of the most appealing features in the sport of hockey is just how quickly fortunes can turn during the endgame. Strategic decisions such as pulling the goalie make even a 1-goal lead somewhat tenuous and even a 2-goal lead far from impossible to overcome in the third period. That said, while the sport does have its charms, the impossible hardly happens every game, and certain leads are considered impossible to blow, such as a 3-goal deficit with 1 minute left in regulation. That said, records are falling left and right on the ice these days, with the Vancouver Canucks doing just that in a game against Dallas. Vancouver was down 5-2 with just a minute left to go in regulation, and managed to score 3 goals in the course of that unforgiving minute, and then another in overtime to win.

Alex Butler, UPI

Ring Pop

Ring Pops were first introduced in 1979 by an engineer who wanted his kid to stop sucking her thumb, and quickly became a novelty hit. Now, along with Baby Bottle Pop and Bazooka gum, Ring Pop is owned by the private-equity backed Bazooka Brands, which is projected to pull in $100 million in sales in 2025. Given the volatility in the price of cocoa, confectioners that don’t make chocolate candies are in an increasingly valuable position, and Ring Pops just opened a new manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania. The plant is 4 times larger than its previous facility and is designed to produce 1.5 million candies every day.

Chris Casey, Food Dive

Benjamins

A new survey asked Americans who they’d like to see added to their money, asking “if the government planned to redesign American coins and bills,” who they’d support making it onto the new money. Candidates with the highest level of support include Theodore Roosevelt (49 percent), Martin Luther King, Jr. (49 percent), Harriet Tubman (43 percent), Rosa Parks (43 percent), Albert Einstein (39 percent) and Eleanor Roosevelt (39 percent). However, Einstein did kick up around 24 percent in opposition, so that might be a tough sell. Figures with particularly high levels of opposition included Walt Disney (49 percent opposed) and Elvis Presley (48 percent), who both bear the distinct mark of being more opposed than Robert E. Lee (38 percent opposed). Other individuals polled include inventors (Edison, 36 percent in favor), patriots (Paul Revere, 32 percent), international sex symbols (Marilyn Monroe, 14 percent) and writers (Mark Twain, 27 percent), but honestly we’ve got those bases already covered by the inventor patriotic entertaining sex symbol writer, Benjamin “Entertainment” Franklin.

Alexander Rossell Hayes, YouGov

Far Side

Soil and rocks returned by the Chang’e 6 spacecraft from the far side of the moon appear to be considerably drier than the rocks on the side that faces Earth, based on a new study of 5 grams of the soil sample. In that sample, the water abundance was estimated to be 1.5 micrograms per gram. This would be considered pretty dry for rocks collected from the Moon’s near side, which range from 1 microgram to 200 micrograms per gram. There’s a sampling issue that prevents us from getting too declarative about the entire side of the celestial body — we have 578 particles from a 5-gram sample out of the entire dark side of the moon — but it is still neat.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

Fuel

In the United States, spent nuclear fuel is stored at about 80 locations around the country, as a long-term solution has evaded planners due to opposition against putting long-term nuclear waste storage near current short-term residences. One frustrating part of this problem is that nuclear waste could absolutely be reprocessed into fresh, usable fuel, and there’s enough energy in that stockpile of nuclear waste to power American electricity needs for a century. However, recycling nuclear waste has been tricky since the Carter Administration banned commercial nuclear waste recycling in 1977. Even though the prohibition was lifted under Reagan, it scared off any investment since the ban scuttled a debut project that cost investors billions of dollars. Now, however, the French state-owned nuclear fuel company Orano (which runs Europe’s top nuclear recycling plant) is partnering up with American startup Curio LV to buy reprocessed uranium and make fresh fuel in the U.S.

Alexander C. Kaufman, Field Notes

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