Numlock News: April 22, 2025 • Himalayas, Yeti, Cardinals

Apr 22, 2025

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Of the many items imported into the United States, one is uniquely in demand and uniquely doomed by tariffs: the vacuum vessel, which is better known by names like the Stanley Cup or the Yeti Mug, the vacuum-sealed instruments that the U.S. imported $1.6 billion of in 2024 but of which 96 percent came from China. The insulated bottle business is an intricate manufacturing process, basically none of which happens outside of China’s manufacturing powerhouse. Stanley saw sales jump from $75 million in 2019 to $750 million in 2023, but ship manifest data reveals most of that product came from China. As for Yeti, with $1.83 billion in revenue (60 percent from drinkware), the company does none of its own manufacturing, and reported that most of its shipments came from China as well.

Jon Keegan, Sherwood News

Election Blog OneThirtyFive

The passing of Pope Francis, pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, will necessitate a conclave. As a former Catholic schoolboy who spent a considerable portion of his career at FiveThirtyEight, this is exactly my jam. There are 135 cardinals under the age of 80 who are eligible to participate in an upcoming papal election, and what’s worth considering is how much Pope Francis steered the eligible voters of the curia over the course of his twelve-year papacy, where now he is responsible for appointing 108 cardinals, 80 percent of eligible voting members of the College of Cardinals. Right now, 40 percent of voting cardinals are from Europe (down from 51 percent when Francis assumed the papacy), 18 percent are from the Asia-Pacific region (up from 10 percent), and 12 percent are from Sub-Saharan Africa (up from 8 percent).

Jeff Diamant, Pew Research Center

Maldives

About a half-million people live in the Maldives, a chain of coral atoll islands, and 90 percent of those islands have experiences severe erosion. To try to contain that erosion and rebuild beaches and make the whole region more resilient, a project called Growing Islands is trying to build underwater passive structures that can reorient currents and build up sediment, and since 2017 has deployed 10 experiments in the Maldives, with the newest installation — the Ramp Ring — aiming to overcome the biggest impediment, seasonal currents that resist a one-size-fits-all solution.

Matthew Ponsford, MIT Technology Review

Snow

Snowfall levels in the Hindu Kush-Himalayan mountain range is at a 23-year low, with snow persistence 23.6 percent below normal levels, according to the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development. This is the third year of decline in a row, which is an issue because two billion people rely on the water that that snowfall eventually becomes. The basins of the Mekong and Salween rivers have lost around half of their snow cover.

Agence France Presse

Tornado

The National Weather Service reported that 552 tornadoes have happened in the United States this year so far, vastly above the 337 average for the January-April period of 1991 to 2020. While many of the touchdowns happened in the traditional tornado alley region, many have happened in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, which are the new regions of a shifting tornado alley, as the center of the are of concern has shifted eastward about 400 to 500 miles.

Mark Fischetti, Scientific American

Air

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that while the nation had 4,821 active air-quality monitoring stations in 2024, over 50 million Americans lived in a county with no air quality monitoring at all. Air pollution sensors go online and offline somewhat frequently — since 1957 and through the study, 20,815 air quality sites had at one point been active at one point or another — many counties have been flying blind. All told, 1,848 counties — 58 percent of counties — have no active sites monitoring air, mainly in the midwest and great plains regions.

Aaron Wagner, Pennsylvania State University

Syria

The cessation of hostilities in Syria after over a decade of civil war has meant many victorious fighters and humanitarian workers from around the world who found themselves in Syria are now considering putting down roots. For instance, Indonesian nationals who were members of the (now dissolved) Islamist Hayat Tahir al-Sham force that eventually overthrew Bashar al-Assad in an 11-day offensive are now just sticking around, drawing salaries from the transitional government, awaiting the promised citizenship. There are about 2,000 to 4,200 foreign nationals among the 25,000 to 30,000 HTS fighters, and citizenship in the new Syria will soon be on the menu.

Amy Chew, Nikkei Asia

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