Numlock News: April 17, 2025 • Wine, Pyramids, Deezer

Apr 17, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Alani Nu

Women had long been elusive for titans of the energy drink world like Monster Energy and Red Bull. But this gender skew was solved by a newcomer to the business, Alani Nu, which launched an energy drink in 2018, hyping 200 milligrams of caffeine and a splash of the vitamin biotin for about 10 calories, packaging the brew in a colorful package and fruity flavors. This strategy managed to be the ticket to a new audience base. Riding on the back of Alani Nu’s success, the percentage of women aged 18 to 34 who had consumed a fitness energy drink rose from 27 percent in 2023 to 37 percent in 2025. Sales of Alani Nu were up 69 percent year over year in the fourth quarter, and the brand was snatched up for $1.8 billion by Celsius Holdings in February.

Rachel Phua and Sunny Kim, Bloomberg

Cruises

The cruise industry has successfully managed to woo younger generations, and the average age of a cruise ship passenger is now 46 years old, down from 49 years old just 2 decades ago. One way the ships have managed this feat is by turning the vessels into experience-laden themed entertainment, the same exact stuff that has separated millennials from their money for the past two decades. The average customer spends $2,154 on a cruise, according to BNP Paribas, and only 68 percent of that is the ticket. Another 18 percent coming from the casino and bar and 6 percent from shore excursions.

Chris Stokel-Walker, Sherwood News

Wine

A new analysis looked at bottles of wine with animals on the label to figure out which creatures connoted quality quaffs. Out of 1,488 wines found with animals on the label grouped based on their branch on the tree of life, there were 16 categories with at least 20 specimens in the set. They pulled the price and the wine’s rating: the median price of a bottle of wine with an animal on it was $3 cheaper than wines without animals, though they shared a median rating of 4 stars. Farm animals like pigs, cattle and sheep were associated with both lower ratings as well as lower prices, while bottles of wine with cats, bears, and mythical creatures tended to be both more expensive and of higher quality. This can be memorized with the trusty mnemonic, “if label be swine, do not drink that wine, if bear, cat or lion, that bottle’s worth tryin’.”

Fox Meyer and Jan Diehm, The Pudding

Egypt

While the Great Pyramid of Giza took 25 years to build, the long-promised Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo has taken over 20 years to get built. After plenty of missed opening days, it really seems like the thing is going to open for real with an official ceremony July 3. As it stands, 11 of the 12 main exhibition galleries are open, even though the star of the show — Tutankhamen and 5,000 pieces of his stuff — is closed off, and Tut himself is still over at the old Egyptian Museum. There are a few eye-drawing hits — a 30-foot-tall, 80-ton statue of Ramses II that’s 3,200 years old is just inside the entry — but the real showstopper is an unobstructed view of the Giza pyramids through a massive pane of windows.

Stephen Hiltner, The New York Times

Deezer

The French music streaming service Deezer is one of the only services being straightforward about the volume of wholly AI-generated tracks that appear on its service. It now claims that about 20,000 fully AI-generated tracks — or about 18 percent of their uploaded content — are being uploaded daily, about double the rate they reported in January. That may actually be an underestimate, given that it’s only the stuff they’re able to catch. Deezer is one of the only services to have a policy against fully AI songs, and its policy is to demonetize them and remove them from its recommendation algorithm, which means users can still seek it out, but it’s not going to get shilled at them.

Kristin Robinson, Billboard

High School

A new survey asked Americans about their high school experiences, honing in on a few commonalities, including having a crush on someone (87 percent), having a group of friends (83 percent), attending a school football game (68 percent) and lying to your parents (67 percent). That last question just shows that at least 33 percent of respondents don’t mind lying to pollsters. Some responses were perhaps painted with the warm patina of memory, as just 10 percent of people said they had bullied someone, which sounds like a Liz Lemon situation if I’ve heard one. One interesting crosstab is the death of the high school job. While 72 percent of respondents aged 45 and up had a job in high school, just 50 percent of those aged 18 to 44 did. This makes sense; that’s what happens when an entire generation of students and parents realize that (aggregated across lifetime earnings) the marginal utility of spending an hour studying for the SAT almost certainly exceeds minimum wage.

Taylor Orth, YouGov

Clean Energy

Despite the federal government rug-pulling support and actively attempting to sabotage projects, the economics of new green energy are simply too undeniable to overcome. A pair of new analyses (one from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the other from BloombergNEF) both show installations of green electrical generation continuing. Even under a scenario where the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules about carbon capture are repealed, the EIA projects coal generation will fall 48 percent in 2032 and 70 percent in 2050. It predicts natural gas consumption will also decline by 2050, with renewables becoming the leading source of power in the U.S. by the 2030s. That said, there will still be costs to the delays: U.S. emissions are projected to fall 16 percent by 2035, compared to the 24 percent predicted last year.

Benjamin Storrow and Brian Dabbs, E&E News

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