Numlock News: August 1, 2025 • Fencing, Beavers, Lightning
By Walt Hickey
Fun news! I’m going on vacation for the next two weeks and have lined up yet another all-star group of guest writers to fill in for me while I’m out. The newsletter is in great hands, and I hope you enjoy the guests and maybe find a new writer you enjoy. Have a great weekend, and I’ll next see you August 18.
En Garde
USA Fencing has announced that it’s developing a new training center in Boston, well, not in Boston — no, not Tufts. The goal is to put a National Training Center in Stow, Massachusetts, slated to open in 2026, situated right near those Ivy League schools that elite fencers are gunning to get into. Fencing is in a position that several sports are finding themselves in following the House settlement. The scandal has roiled the collegiate sports scene and made some colleges reconsider their support for more niche sports like fencing, when that money is arguably better spent on football or basketball. The governing bodies behind those smaller sports are worried that this could, for instance, destroy a relatively successful talent pipeline into international competition. USA Fencing (which has relatively modest revenues of $17.8 million as of this past year, about $11.5 million of which is from dues and registration fees) is one of the five sports — along with Squash, Cycling, Sailing and Rowing — that pooled their commercial and media rights in a new collective that is designed to make the niches more riches. If I had to bet on anyone to find a way to stay relevant in the new NIL system, it’s probably the guys who somehow convinced the Olympics to continue to allow swordfights.
Parts and Labor
In May, Apple announced that after years of pressure, it would begin selling repair parts for the iPad to the general public, thanks largely to a new batch of right-to-repair laws around the world. Now that they’re actually doing it, the repair community has found the obvious catch: Apple is charging exorbitant rates for parts that can be obtained otherwise inexpensively on the aftermarket. A new charge port on the iPad Pro 11 costs $250 from Apple, an order of magnitude more expensive than the $20 that other places sell the part for. A digitizer that costs $50 from third-party suppliers, Apple is charging $200 for, and a replacement screen assembly is going for $749 for the iPad Pro 13.
Lightning
The World Meteorological Organization’s Committee on Weather and Climate Extremes has certified a new record: the longest lightning strike ever measured. The record-setting bolt from the blue occurred in October 2017 and spanned 515 miles (829 km) from East Texas towards Kansas City. The strike was found when satellite data was reanalyzed last year. This beats out a bolt that measured 477 miles that occurred during a storm in 2020.
Emma R. Hasson, Scientific American
Songs
For the past two decades, the songs that made the Top 40 have been getting conspicuously shorter. The financial motivations of streaming (getting paid by the song, not the minute after all) and the explosion of short-form video apps as the mechanisms of music discovery and spread incentivize artists to make songs shorter, and reward those who play ball with chart position. By 2019, the average song to make the U.K. Top 40 fell to three minutes 12 seconds. Artists are cutting down on the introductions to songs and front-loading the hooks, often forgoing a first verse and diving right into a chorus, spiking any bridge along the way. But things are changing: the average length of a hit single in the first six months of the year was 3.5 minutes, indicating that the trend may be subsiding.
Mark Savage and Jess Carr, BBC News
Dam It
For the past decade, researchers have been concerned by beaver activity in the far north — in areas that beavers were previously not able to survive in. Warming temperatures mean that beavers can move to areas that had been off-limits and implement their sophisticated hydroengineering efforts in places that they’ve never impacted before. Satellite imagery reveals over 11,000 beaver ponds in the Arctic tundra south of the Brooks Range, a number which doubled between 2003 and 2017. Researchers now expect beavers to sweep across Alaska’s North Slope within this century, which might seriously change the ecosystem.
Jollies
Hershey’s Jolly Rancher business has experienced massive growth for a 76-year-old hard candy after introducing soft and gummy versions of the confectionery. Jolly Ranchers were a $400 million business last year, up 25 percent year over year, which is remarkable growth for a well-established and otherwise deeply boring brand. The big winner last year was Jolly Rancher Ropes, and the percentage of Jolly Rancher sales from the hard candies dropped from 80 percent a decade ago to less than half today.
Christopher Doering, Food Dive
Licensing
The total retail sales of licensed products last year came in at $307.9 billion, up 10 percent year over year. The practice — a media company, sports figure or brand allowing another company to make products featuring their characters or appearances in exchange for a cut of the revenue — was dominated by the likes of Disney (which made an estimated $63 billion from licensed products), Authentic Brands ($32 billion), Dotdash Meredith ($26.7 billion) and NBC Universal ($16.1 billion). Other companies like Warner Bros. Discovery, Pokémon Co., Mattel and Hasbro appear in the top 10, as well. One of these days, you’ll see Numlock up there. My royalty checks from every keyboard in the world produced from 1978 to 2011 are going to start rolling in any day now.
This week in the (unlocked!) Sunday Edition, I spoke to Steve Brusatte a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh and the author of books like The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. Last week, Brusatte offered his thoughts to CNN about the sale of a ceratosaurus fossil to a private collector for millions of dollars.
I wanted to talk to him to give him a chance to expand on his really interesting point of view on the manner of dinosaur auctions. Brusatte can be found at BlueSky and Instagram and his book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs really is superb.
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Enjoy the vacation, Walt!!
I always enjoy the news about candy. It fascinates me that there even IS news about candy. I hope your vacation is going well! Much deserved!