Numlock News: August 20, 2025 • Smells, Pollen, Kokuho
By Walt Hickey
Uranus
The Webb Space Telescope found a new moon that is 10 kilometers wide and orbiting the planet Uranus. This increases the number of known Uranus moons from 28 to 29. The moon is faint and small, which is why scientists think it eluded the eye of Voyager 2 back in the ’70s, and was seen by Webb’s near-infrared camera in February. Now, here’s the thing: all the moons of Uranus are named after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. An egotist might suggest that it’s only right that we name it Walter, after Walter Whitmore, a minor character from Henry VI, Part 2, but I am not an egotist. I might also suggest that we name it after A Bear, the one from the stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear” from The Winter’s Tale. However, with all the Ursas major and minors, there are already plenty of bears in space, thank you very much. I could suggest that we name it Nurse or Porter or Attendant or A Priest, given that this incredibly minor moon might be worthy of an incredibly minor character. But instead, I am still reeling from the effects of all-boys Catholic high school, and so I demand that we name this Coriolanus, moon of Uranus.
Adithi Ramakrishnan, The Associated Press
Pollen
Pollen can be deeply annoying to those with allergies, but it is fascinating from a botany and materials science perspective. While to a plant, pollen are just microscopic grains containing male reproductive cells, for some researchers, it’s a subject of fascination and a potential building block for paper and other biomaterials. Pollen’s rigid outer shell is made of a tough polymer, sporopollenin, and after being incubated in an alkaline solution, it can be pliable like Play-Doh. It can also be flattened to a strong but flexible paper or film, depending on the thickness. While turning trees into paper can be resource-intensive, pollen is easy to work with; a single floret of a sunflower produces 25,000 to 67,000 grains every summer.
Merit
The bankruptcy of Merit Street Media — the production studio set up by Dr. Phil — is getting very ugly, with distribution partner Trinity Broadcasting, a Christian television network, suing Phil McGraw. Trinity Broadcasting is alleging that he swindled the company as part of a $500 million 10-year deal to produce 160 new 90-minute episodes of Dr. Phil, his once-popular television show. The distributor claims that despite Trinity spending over $100 million to keep the network afloat through June, the number of episodes produced was, in fact, zero.
Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter
Kokuho
The new movie Kokuho from Toho is an unconventional hit in Japan, specifically because it’s the first live-action Japanese movie to gross over 10 billion yen (US$67.7 million) at the Japanese box office in 22 years. The movie, whose title roughly translates to “national treasure,” is a story about the son of a gangster who is adopted into a family of actors working in kabuki, a classical form of Japanese theater. For decades, anime has dominated domestically produced movies in Japan. However, Kokuho has become the kind of long-legged hit that can bring in repeat viewers, slowly building an audience week over week and only rising to No. 1 at the box office in its third week. Only four live-action titles grossed over 10 billion yen in the past 10 years. Other than Kokuho, they were all from outside of Japan, like Top Gun: Maverick.
Synch
The music industry makes most of its money from the direct consumption of music — historically, purchases, these days, streams. However reliable slice of the industry’s revenues has come from synchronisation, which is the term for money that commercials and movies pay to use certain music. Synch revenues hit $650 million in 2024, up 6.4 percent — a solid chunk of change and good for 2.2 percent of all global recorded music revenues. Lately, the U.K. and the artists from there have been enjoying a streak of success in synch.
Shepherds
Churches have come to rely on the same kind of sophisticated customer management software used across the corporate world. Gloo — a company founded in 2013 — holds contracts with 100,000 churches and ministries, a solid slice of the 370,000 congregations of the United States. Gloo tracks how often a person attends church, how much they donate and which groups a person signs up for. It then plugs that information into census and consumer data to present churches with a sophisticated dashboard of their membership. Beyond the increasingly standard tech stack for the multitude, some churches are taking things even further. Over 200 churches worldwide are installing cameras from FA6 Events (also known as Churchix) to turn every entrance into a biometric checkpoint, using facial recognition tech and an onboard neural network to identify who actually shows up to church. This is fascinating tech, to be sure, but it is still years behind earlier innovations out of Rome, which can replicate the entire effect of those systems through a peer-to-peer decentralized application architecture called “guilt.”
Smells
A new study out of Germany asked 1,227 participants to evaluate 73 odors. The overall conclusion was “odor is really complicated and resists easy, one-sentence descriptions of the study outcome. And honestly, you should just try to give this one a read,” give or take. But there were some trends! The more complex the molecule, the more appealing the scent, which makes sense given that Chanel No. 5 probably has a bit more going on than huffing acetone. Descriptions of the scents revealed which qualities tended to be more consistently linked to higher pleasantness, with the difference between the scores of a molecule considered “sweet” and “not sweet” coming in at +27, the highest such differential in the set. On the other hand, “decayed” came in at -35. Other high-scoring qualities included “flower,” “fruit” and “bakery,” while negative scoring qualities included “ammonia,” “sweaty” and “fish.”
Clara Moskowitz, Miriam Quick, and Jen Christiansen, Scientific American
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Nice to have you back Walt. I truly missed your snark!