Numlock News: August 14, 2026 • Antediluvian, Mummy's Curse, Immortal Fungi

Aug 14, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

You Cannot Kill Me In A Way That Matters

A new paper explores the complicated question of “how old do fungi get?” which invites the immediate question of “how do you calculate the age of a fungus,” and then of course the ultimately grey areas of “what do you mean by alive?” and “what exactly do you mean by death anyway?” and of course “you keep on using this word organism, what exactly is an organism in this context?” Longevity is already an exciting frontier in fungi; saprotrophic fungi such as Fairy ring fungi are usually not older than 80 years, but some exceptions live to 500 years. The mycelium of Armillaria ostoyae in the Blue Mountains of Oregon is believed to be a single organism anywhere from 1,900 to 8,650 years old.

Ayla Mongès, Dimitrios Floudas and Kristin Aleklett, Trends in Microbiology

Sharks

A research team attempted to exploit the fact that sharks are covered in dermal denticles, and those tooth-like scales are shed over their lives and can survive in the sediment for millennia. This means that researchers were able to determine the relative abundance of sharks historically, specifically from 7,000 to 3,000 years ago, off the coasts of Panama. The answer was surprising: they found 3,497 denticles from 157 samples. On the Caribbean coast, researchers found roughly 50 denticles in 10 kilograms of reef sediment, but on the Pacific coast the concentration was 200 denticles in just a single kilogram. All told, the Pacific coast had something like 20 times the abundance of sharks than the Caribbean coast, historically.

Harrison Tasoff, University of California - Santa Barbara

The Flood

A new study published in Nature looks at the events surrounding the great flood of 1342 — the Magdalena Flood — and found that rather than a single event, it was in fact 16 flood events lasting from 1341 to 1343. They were able to reconstruct month-by-month the hydrological events of Europe over the course of the period. Several theories were considered as the cause; from 1340 to 1341, there were an unusually high number of volcanic eruptions, which followed a period of known Arctic sea ice decline that began in the mid-1330s.

Florian Aigner, Vienna University of Technology

Mummy

A study looked at the advertisements for 128 posts and auction listings attempting to sell a mummy or parts of a mummy online. The data uncovered reveals the true cause of the Mummy’s Curse: These things are biologically gnarly, with 13 of them hosting visible fungal colonization. The analysis also turned up information about the current state of the internet mummy industry; 55 percent were sellers in the United States, 80 percent managed to cite the actual region of origin of the mummy, 43 percent were from Egypt and 21 from percent South America. Of them, 52 percent were heads in various states of completeness and preservation.

Amy Platts, Staffordshire University and Kirsty Squires, Dario Piombino-Mascali, Clara Urzì and Damien Huffer, Cambridge University Press

🥀

The emoji with the swiftest rise in popularity in the past year is 🥀, which young people are using to indicate they feel wilted, with usage up 190 percent over the period. Other fast-rising emojis include 🫰(hand with index finger and thumb crossed), up 109 percent, 🇧🇷 the flag of Brazil (up 70 percent), 💔the broken heart (up 68 percent) and 👅 the tongue (up 57 percent). Worldwide, the single-most popular emoji was 😭, which sounds about right; the big news is that 😭 has surpassed 💀 as the thing to use when you think something is rather funny.

Eve Washington, Larry Buchanan and Claire Cain Miller, The New York Times

Movies

In 2025, only 33.6 percent of speaking roles in movies were women or girls, on par with the past two decades of data, indicating that yet again men outnumber women on screen two-to-one. Women were the lead in just 38 of the top 100 films. In 2025, women were just 8.2 percent of top directors, 16 percent of writers, 8.5 percent of composers and 24.4 percent of producers.

Stacy L. Smith, The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative

Dish

EchoStar, which owns the Dish system, is in bankruptcy, and over 3,000 small property owners who allowed their property to be used for Dish Wireless’ equipment have apparently been screwed over in the process. Dish has not paid rent for its equipment — some $2,500 per month in some cases — and has put many of its lessors in the lurch, among them some 80 churches. For example, Community Congregational Church in Short Hills, New Jersey is owed $87,634 in rent and $39,650 to remove the equipment, and Community of the Savior in Rochester, New York is looking for $96,924.

Jonathan Randles and Steven Church, Bloomberg

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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