Numlock News: April 13, 2026 • Prada, Bonbon Drop Seal, Beef

Apr 13, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Beef

A pound of lean ground beef costs $8.20 in the United States as of March, up from $7.48 in March 2025 and up from $5.68 in 2016. Herd sizes are down to their lowest levels since 1951, and droughts and crop failures have driven up the price of raising cattle. That eye-popping figure came before any of the possible inflationary effects caused by the Strait of Hormuz closure; it’s not exactly right to say that we turn oil into cows, but it’s not entirely inaccurate either, as gasoline and fertilizer are both key components in the production of feed.

Mark Gongloff, Bloomberg

Sticker

In 2024, Q-Lia released a decorated sticker pack called the Bonbon Drop Seal that has sent Japan into sticker collecting mania, with over 200 designs priced anywhere from 418 yen to 550 yen. Through February of this year, 21 million sheets have been shipped, with six million of those sheets coming from this most recent January and February alone. This is not the first sticker trading trend of this kind in Japan, but what’s interesting for this one is the economy that has developed around it given the high fraction of fans who are adults.

Yurika Yoneda, Nikkei Asia

College

The demand for higher education is expected to decline due to a broader demographic shift, as well as shifts in preferences around the need for a college education. The percentage of American teenagers who enroll in college after high school dropped from 70 percent in 2016 to 62 percent in 2022, and in general, the number of students who graduate high school is expected to decline through the 2040s. It’s not going to be a huge problem at the top — looking at the 60 or so schools that accept 20 percent or less of their applicants, applications are up from 800,000 two years ago to 2.35 million today — but for many of the other 4,000 or so colleges in the United States, we’re averaging about 60 closures a year.

Jeffrey Selingo, The Atlantic

Box Office

After a great early start to the year with hits in the form of Project Hail Mary and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, exhibitors are looking forward to the summer kicking off not with a superhero movie but with the long-awaited sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. Early tracking has the movie opening to $66 million over the May 1-3 weekend. The lack of a superhero flick to launch the summer season is due in part to reverberations from the Hollywood labor strikes and the schedule horse trading that had to happen subsequently; the new Avengers movie was punted from the first of May to December.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Hurricanes

Colorado State University’s forecast is in for the 2026 hurricane season, and they’re expecting a somewhat lighter season this year thanks to an El Niño formation that might send winds and break up storms. The forecast projects 13 named tropical storms, six of which can reach the status of hurricane, and two of which can be called “major” given their wind speeds exceeding 111 miles per hour.

Reuters

Solar Cycles

Researchers have been able to piece together records of space weather dating back hundreds of years by identifying written records of visible auroras and then getting confirmation of that space activity by checking tree rings for elevated levels of carbon-14. The study, published in Proceedings of the Japanese Academy, Series B, followed up on a diary entry of a Japanese noble named Fujiwara no Sadaie that reported three nights of auroras in the winter of 1204. By looking at other records of solar activity, the researchers believe that the solar cycles were shorter, lasting between seven and eight years rather than the 11-year solar cycle we have today.

Jacek Krywko, Scientific American

Corruption

A new study looked at what happened to the restaurant industry when China’s ruling Communist Party rolled out new rules designed to rein in luxury travel and restaurant high rollers within the government. The study found that customer visits to restaurants near government offices fell by 5.5 percent and that the average spending per person fell by 2.7 percent which led to $400 million in lost sales annually for restaurants in Beijing.

Rui Du, The Conversation

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