Numlock News: April 15, 2025 • Meteorites, Neutrinos, Prosecco

Apr 15, 2025

Warhol

FBI agents from the art crime team raided a gallery in Miami last week, arresting the owner and an associate and charging them with wire fraud conspiracy after evidence emerged that the gallery was part of an elaborate scheme to sell counterfeit Andy Warhol paintings to wealthy art buyers. One family of collectors claimed the gallery tricked them into spending $6 million on fakes, eventually discovered to be forgeries by an appraisal at Christie’s. The gallery went as far as to send over 2 experts to confirm the Warhols were the real deal; these “experts” were, in fact, just two guys posing as appraisers who had fake business cards, according to a complaint.

Carolina Ana Drake, The Art Newspaper

Neutrinos

Neutrinos are the lightest of the massive particles, and the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment in Germany is aiming to figure out how much these little guys weigh. After 259 days of data collection, the lab has been able to set the lowest-ever upper limit on the mass of the neutrino, coming in at just 0.45 electron volts. That is less than a millionth of the mass of an electron. The overall experiment is expected to run for 1,000 days, so this is just a little appetizer of the physics yet to come. The fun thing about this experiment is that KATRIN is going to get more and more sensitive as things proceed; it is already twice as sensitive as it was last year, and by the conclusion of the run, the sensitivity will be targeted for a lower-end neutrino mass of 0.3 electron volts.

Gayoung Lee, Scientific American

Bubbles

While overall consumption of wine is at the lowest levels seen since 1996, if there are bubbles in the wine, people are still buying. Sparkling wine of all sorts has managed to evade the downturn. While the rest of the business has been going in the wrong direction, sparkling wine’s overall market share increased from 8 percent in 2017 to 12 percent in 2022, though that has since leveled off. While the best-known kind of sparkling wine is French Champagne, you don’t have to be a half-in-the-bag Orson Welles to know that the rest of the world is capable of making some pretty good sparkling wine. In fact, the real winner of the bubble boom has been Prosecco from Italy, which is being bottled at all-time-highs and now accounts for nearly 25 percent of the total SOP wine production out of Italy. Champagne’s compound annual growth rate declined 7 percent from 2021 to 2023, while Prosecco’s was up 5 percent over the same period.

John Sumners, Vine Pair

Netflix

A new analysis of Netflix’s most viewed content in the back half of the year found that of the 500 most popular programs on the service not produced in the United States, South Korea led the pack, producing 17 percent of them. Overall, in the back half of 2024, content from the U.S. accounted for 59 percent of viewing hours, content from Korea 8 percent, content from the United Kingdom 7 percent, from Japan 5 percent and then from Canada, Spain, India and France 2 percent, with the remainder of the world accumulating to a 14 percent share.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

New York City

While the city of New York remains a major draw for transplants, immigrants and people who want to move there, Manhattan real estate is increasingly becoming something you inherit, not come by on your own. Last year, 28 percent of Manhattan home sales involved a trust, significantly higher than the 17 percent just 3 years ago, and brokers and advisers say that it’s typically parents using trusts to buy homes for children. All-cash sales made up 60 percent of purchases in 2024, and the median sales price on the island came to $1.1 million.

Paulina Cachero, Bloomberg

Port

The Port of Los Angeles is the busiest in the United States, primarily handling containers coming over from Asia. Needless to say, a brisk first quarter where 2,504,049 20-foot equivalent units were moved through the port (up 5.2 percent year over year) is expected to be the exception for this year; all signs indicate that trade fights will seriously slash incoming containers to Los Angeles. Loaded exports for March out of L.A. were down 15 percent year over year, a sign that other countries’ responses to tariffs were stymying American exports. June import volumes are expected to fall to 1.57 million TEU, and July and August projections are currently coming in at 27 percent and 26.8 percent lower than last year.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Meteorites

Based on observations from telescopes, most asteroids contain water bound within minerals in the rock and have carbonaceous compositions. Therefore, one would expect that over half of meteorites ought to be carbonaceous as well. However, just 4 percent of all meteorites found on Earth are carbonaceous, which is a bit of a “what gives?” moment. A new study published in Nature Astronomy believes it has the answer. For a while, the thought was that Earth’s atmosphere was better at filtering out carbonaceous debris compared to, say, a hunk of iron. What the study found, instead, is that many of the asteroid pieces aren’t even making it into the atmosphere in the first place, and carbonaceous material tends to break down as it heats up when getting close to the sun and then cools down when it goes further away. This indicates that while Earth’s atmosphere does a lot of the work of burning off carbonaceous meteorites, the Sun is also doing a solid job of either burning them off or softening them up by the time they get close.

Patrick M. Shober, The Conversation

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