Numlock News: August 22, 2025 • Pickleball, Giraffes, Planet Y

Aug 22, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Pickleball

Two transactions have put hard numbers on teams competing in Major League Pickleball. The Palm Beach Royals ownership is putting up $16 million as an expansion fee to join the league next year, and just this week, a majority stake in the Los Angeles Mad Drops was sold at a price valuing the team at $13 million. The Royals are now the 23rd team competing in the professional league, and are one of four teams based in Florida. The league’s playoffs aired last week on ESPN2, where they averaged 81,000 viewers.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Clock Out

New data from anonymized mobile phone data appears to show that while time of arrival at the office is close to the numbers in 2019, workers have been punching out of the office a little earlier than they did pre-pandemic in cities across the country. In New York, people leave the office 13 minutes earlier than they did in 2019, that’s 18 minutes in Dallas, 22 minutes in Chicago and 26 minutes in San Francisco.

Callum Borchers, The Wall Street Journal

Giraffes

A new report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature found that giraffes are actually four different species rather than just one. Previously, giraffes had all been lumped into a single species, Giraffa camelopardalis, with nine subspecies. However, in 2016 debate broke out when genetic data revealed that the differences between those giraffe populations were larger than previously thought. Researchers concluded that the divergences were, in fact, closer to the genetic distance between a polar bear and a brown bear. This led to a proposal to split up giraffes into four species: Maasai (Giraffa tippelskirchi), northern (Giraffa camelopardalis), reticulated (Giraffa reticulata) and southern giraffes (Giraffa giraffa). This has implications for conservation; there are only 7,037 northern giraffes, a fraction of the size of the 68,837 southern giraffes, which have benefited from conservation programs.

Maina Waruru, Science

Lights

Light pollution is altering the days of birds, a large study has found. Researchers analyzed the bird calls of over 500 species across multiple continents, analyzing millions of recordings collected from thousands of devices as part of the BirdWeather program. The study, published in Science, found that a bird’s days are on average 50 minutes longer, with the birds vocalizing 20 minutes earlier in the morning and ending vocalizations 30 minutes later into the evening.

Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR

Cars

The color of a car can have big implications for the temperature of the area around it, a new study finds. Researchers left two cars, one white and one black, out in five hours of daylight, and then measured the local air temperature around them after the fact. The black car (which absorbs light and reflects only five percent to 10 percent) raised the local air temperature by as much as 3.8 degrees Celsius. The white car (which reflects 75 percent to 85 percent of sunlight) had a much, much smaller impact. When you extrapolate these findings to, say, a whole city full of automobiles, the effect can be compounded.

Jeremy Hsu, New Scientist

Reading

A new study analyzed responses from 236,270 respondents to the Americans Time Use Survey from 2003 to 2023, and found only 16 percent of adults read for pleasure on a given day in 2023. That is the lowest rate on record and down from 40 percent of adults who read for pleasure in 2003. The percentage of adults who read for pleasure has dropped 3 percent annually from 2003 to 2023. The good news is that those who did read for pleasure in 2023 clocked in at an hour and 37 minutes of reading per day, which was up from 1 hour 23 minutes in 2003. Gotta be honest, I did not really expect that the Pizza Hut BOOK IT!® program was somehow a load-bearing pillar holding up the firmament of American civil society, and yet here we are.

Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly

Planet Y

For years, scientists have investigated the possibility of Planet X — a hypothetical planet seven times the mass of Earth orbiting the sun at 50 astronomical units, and could be responsible for distant objects displaying perturbations in behavior. The possibility of Planet X has been largely rejected, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything funky going on in the distant outer solar system. Planet Y is a newly proposed world that could explain the warping effect in the orbits of some Kuiper belt objects. It's theorized mass and location differ significantly from earlier ideas about Planet X, with an orbital distance 100 to 200 times that of Earth, a mass smaller than Earth’s but larger than Mercury’s and (more importantly) a 15-degree incline to the orbit. The hope is that the newly opened Vera Rubin Observatory might aid in the detection of such a world.

Jonathan O’Callaghan, New Scientist

Thanks again to all the writers who filled in for me when I was on vacation! Check them out, I read all of them and enjoy them very much:

Manny Fidel of the podcast NO SUCH THING.
Allegra Rosenberg, can be found at her Substack tchotchke
Olivia Walch, get her books Political Geometry: Rethinking Redistricting in the US with Math, Law, and Everything In Between and Sleep Groove
Rachael Dottle, who can be found doing graphics at Bloomberg
Dave Infante of the boozeletter Fingers
Adam Bumas, an internet researcher at Garbage Day.
Eli McKown-Dawson, a writer at Silver Bulletin
Chris Dalla Riva of the excellent Can't Get Much Higher
Madison Hall, who writes at Ignites
Julia Alexander, a media correspondent for Puck News who also writes the Posting Nexus newsletter
And of course Dave Levinthal who kindly stepped in for both Sunday editions.

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