Numlock News: April 4, 2025 • Particle Colliders, Spy Satellites, Botanical Gardens
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
NoKo
As tariffs roil the American tech industry, investors on the hunt for the next big thing in tech don’t need to look any further for a true disruptor in the industry. There is a place where the tech world has the full support of the government, where ascendant trends like crypto and nuclear are being pushed to the limit and where talented coders can quickly rise fresh out of school. I speak, of course, of North Korea, which has built an incredibly sophisticated crypto hacking cell that carries out massive cyberattacks worldwide to raise funds for the country’s nuclear weapons program. The government needs about $6 billion a year, and crypto theft has reliably delivered billions; this year, North Korea scored a massive haul after raiding Bybit, which resulted in a $1.5 billion windfall.
Patricia Kowsmann and Timothy W. Martin, The Wall Street Journal
Colliders
After the success of the Large Hadron Collider in confirming the existence of the Higgs boson, the world’s high-energy physics community can finally converge on solving the single most important unsolved problem in particle physics: how the hell are they going to convince people to give them money for an even larger collider? CERN has unveiled a feasibility study about the Future Circular Collider, which would be 3 times the size of the Large Hadron Collider. This collider would smash electrons and positrons together to get high-precision studies of the Higgs boson before eventually getting to 85 TeV, at which point it can smash protons together. It is a tall order: 15.32 billion Swiss francs ($17.4 billion) to dig a 91-kilometer circular tunnel. How to get the funding for it — or whether it’s actually the best path forward for physics in general — is a point of contention even within CERN.
Davide Castelvecchi, Nature Magazine
Walk Hard
The era of musical biopics is getting completely out of hand, with new movies about musicians increasing at an untenable pace. From 1990 to 1994, there were just 16 musical biopics produced, a number that increased to 68 musical biopics from 2020 to 2024. Part of this increase can be attributed to the catalogs of many musicians getting sold off to financial enterprises. When a faceless corporation decides whether or not to greenlight a jukebox biopic, it’s a lot easier to get the movie made than it is when it’s up to people such as artists or their heirs who might have a little more skin in the game.
Chris Dalla Riva, Can’t Get Much Higher
Kosmos
Three Russian satellites that launched on February 2 of this year — Kosmos 2581, 2582 and 2583 — have drawn attention from those keeping eyes on the sky. Their purpose is classified by the Russians, but they are certainly doing some peculiar stuff in their near-polar orbit. In March, the satellites triggered intrigue when they began maneuvering close to other objects in space. The U.S. gained specific interest after Space Force spotted a new object in orbit, which may have been released by Kosmos 2581 on March 18.
Botanicals
A new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution found that space in botanical gardens is getting tight worldwide, which is an issue for endangered plants. While 800 threatened animal species are managed by zoos worldwide, tens of thousands of plants threatened by rapidly shifting environmental changes can be found preserved in botanical gardens. Though only 5 percent to 10 percent of capacity is devoted to plant conservation, botanical gardens are increasingly seen as a potential backup for many plants facing extinction. Take the case of the Wollemi pine, a species of plant that had been presumed extinct for 70 million to 90 million years but was found in a national park in Australia in 1994. Though only 45 mature individuals and 46 juveniles survived in its native habitat — and their exact location remains a secret — a backup collection of propagated Wollemi pines is cultivated at the Australian Botanic Garden, Mount Annan, as a nice insurance policy when fires in 2019 and 2020 burned 17 million hectares of eastern Australia.
Corpse Flower
A string of indignities continues, as the “corpse flower” plant that reeks of rotting flesh upon blooming is, in fact, incredibly inbred. This comes from a new survey of almost 1,188 plants across 111 collections. The study, published in Annals of Botany, found that 24 percent of the studied plants were clones and another 27 percent were offspring from two closely related individual plants. One institution reported that complications with their corpse flowers included specimens lacking chlorophyll altogether, which they attributed to the compounding effects of inbreeding. This is also an issue because there are no seeds of the flower just lying around: corpse flower seeds are no longer viable after drying and can’t be stored in long-term collections, so what’s currently living is what we’ve got.
Forget It, Jake
The state of California is in great shape for summer, with the state’s snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains reaching 96 percent of average at the start of April. First time in 25 years, the state has had 3 consecutive years of ample water in the mountains. This comes on the heels of the driest 3-year period on record: the run from 2020 to 2022. The water situation is doing just fine by other measures, too. Since October, precipitation was 103 percent of average, and the state’s reservoirs are 117 percent of their average level.
Hey! It’s been an amazing couple of weeks in the Sunday edition for readers who pay $5 a month for the newsletter, we’ve talked to some great writers and discussed some fascinating books. Do check them out:
I spoke to Olga Khazan who wrote the brand new book, Me, But Better. The book dives into the science of personality, where it comes from, and the real ways that we can change our own personalities in one direction or another.
I spoke to Alissa Wilkinson who is out with the brand new book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. It’s a really wonderful book and if you’re a longtime Joan Didion fan or simply a future Joan Didion fan, it’s a look at a really transformative era of Hollywood and should be a fun read regardless.
We also talked to Allegra Rosenberg, who wrote From Antarctica with Love for Atavist Magazine, it reveals a relationship between two men who served on the Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole. It’s based on some newly digitized diaries and historical data, and I just loved it.
The Sunday Edition is a ton of fun, and if you enjoy the newsletter you should consider upgrading to a paid subscription that includes it!
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