By Walt Hickey

Liquids

Beverage sales in the food retail industry last year hit $295 billion, up three percent year over year. Thing is, that’s far shy of the seven percent average annual sales growth notched in the beverage business from 2019 to 2024. Alcoholic beverage sales dropped two percent to $74 billion in 2025, while sales of nonalcoholic drinks increased by five percent over the same period. Energy drinks were up 15 percent, coffee beverages up 13 percent, carbonated beverages six percent and bottled water and milk each up four percent.

Catherine Douglas Moran, Food Dive

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Myoglobin

A new study utilizing microbial engineering found that plants engineered to produce animal protein — myoglobin — within their chloroplasts were pretty good at the task. Using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, the myoglobin yields were 800 mg per kilogram dry weight in tobacco plants and 810 mg per kilogram in lettuce. Straightforwardly, that’s a fraction of real meat — which comes in at 8,100 to 11,200 mg per kilogram — but given how much more efficient plant cultivation is compared to livestock, it is still a remarkable source of protein.

Frontiers

Bluetooth

In 2025, Bitchat was launched, a messaging service that allows phones that are close to one another to communicate messages across Bluetooth even when the official mobile networks have been taken down. This is particularly consequential in countries where the government often resorts to internet blocking when civil unrest develops. The biggest test for Bitchat came just a few weeks ago, when India’s government cut off a number of mobile networks over increasing grassroots dissent; Bitchat reached an all-time high of 430,000 daily active users in India on July 26; from the 20th to the 26th, India was responsible for 74 percent of downloads.

Ananya Bhattacharya, Rest of World

Squishy

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has announced a war on counterfeit squishy toys. CPSC has to date identified 55 shipments of squishy toys that violate policy — breaking or tearing during foreseeable use, containing excessive levels of prohibited chemicals, failing to comply with federal requirements regarding water beads and lacking warnings and certifications otherwise required — and as a result has prevented 355,683 units from entering the country.

Natalie Miller, ToyBook and CPSC

Starters

The NFL preseason is officially on, as the most popular sports league in North America careens toward season kickoff. That said, preseason has meant less than ever before: Once the venue by which teams try out talent on the cusp of the starting lineup, these days it’s rarer than ever to see actual starting talent on the field. In 2025, 9.8 percent of pass attempts in preseason games came from quarterbacks who would eventually start in week 1, down from 32.4 percent in 2012.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Graded

Beckett Collectibles, one of the companies that evaluates the quality of trading cards, has called a temporary pause on online grading submissions. As it stands, the company has too much of a backlog to continue to accept new orders, echoing similar moves from industry leader PSA. According to the company, the number of cards submitted over the past year was up 102 percent, and the number of trading card game cards graded was up 159 percent.

Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICV2

Pluto

A new study published in the Planetary Science Journal explores evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising to the surface of Pluto along cracks in the iconic heart-shaped glacier on the surface of the dwarf planet. Sputnik Planitia is a glacier made of frozen nitrogen that is larger than Texas and Oklahoma combined. New analysis indicates that the linear features seen on the glacier appear to be occasionally wetted, and the liquid in question is probably liquid nitrogen. This furthermore indicates that the surface of Sputnik Planitia is likely less than one million years old, meaning that Pluto’s heart appears to have been for our eyes only.

Southwest Research Institute

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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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