Numlock News: December 2, 2025 • Kabuki, ICARUS, Feta

Dec 02, 2025

By Walt Hickey

National Treasure

Kokuho, a three-hour drama about kabuki theater, has become the top-grossing domestic live-action film in Japan’s history. The movie has earned 17.37 billion yen (US$111 million), beating a stubborn record held for 22 years by the iconic crime comedy Bayside Shakedown 2, which earned 17.35 billion yen. It’s Japan’s official submission to the 2026 Oscars for best international feature, where it’s a major contender. The film’s success has fostered a new surge of interest in the theater form as kabuki theaters report surges in attendance and younger customers.

Patrick Brzeski, The Hollywood Reporter

ICARUS

A major wildlife tracking project (using a German-built antenna on the International Space Station to track small animals) was scuttled in 2022 when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stopped data flow to the ground station in Russia. Luckily, the quality of data obtained in that first wave of analysis was sufficiently great to greenlight phase two. The not-at-all-hubristically-named International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space (ICARUS) project is now planning to run the off a network of CubeSats and other satellites in low Earth orbit. One receiver is currently in orbit, another is due to launch next year and hopefully another six will be up and running by 2027. The animal tags are downright tiny — one gram each and able to transmit location info for a year — and down to a cost of $150 to $200 each, a decrease from $300 in 2022. The project will allow smaller animals like birds can be tracked in ways that only large animals have been observed.

Elizabeth Pennisi, Science

RC Cola

Keurig Dr Pepper is actually attempting to revive the RC Cola brand, which is the cola brand for when you messed up so bad that not even Pepsi is on the menu. Earlier this year, Keurig Dr Pepper attempted to execute the first brand awareness campaign that was not specifically targeted at people who fell down in a grocery store and rolled into the back of the shelves — the first ad campaign for RC Cola in 40 years. Founded in 1905 and accomplishing very little since, to dismiss RC Cola as “the Reform Party in the two-party system of the cola aisle” would actually insult the electoral performance of Ross Perot in the late ’90s. Having not changed its packaging since the 1980s, RC Cola’s brand awareness remains stable, if terrible. Still, Keurig Dr Pepper must be eyeing the cola business — which accounted for 46 percent of all soda sales and grew 4.6 percent year over year in 2024 — and at least thought to remind the world that yes, indeed, RC Cola remains available, if only out of sheer due diligence and the off-chance of sparking some sort of TikTok challenge.

Laurel Deppen, Food Dive

Feta

In devastating news for both Greece as well as the specific part of Queens I live in, an infectious pox is still ripping through sheep and goat herds in northern Greece. The necessary culling to stop the spread of the illness is threatening the cheese industry. As it stands, about four to five percent of sheep and goats in the country have been culled. About 80 percent of Greek sheep and goat’s milk goes towards making feta cheese, and given the EU protections around the designation of origin, any attempt by another country to make up the slack can’t actually produce “feta.” Last year, Greece exported 785 million euros (US$909 million) worth of feta. Trade data indicates that 520 million euros goes to other places in the EU, 90 million euros to the UK and much of the balance to me, personally.

Kostas Koukoumakas, BBC News

Landslides

Communities in Alaska are taking landslide prevention into their own hands as federal support for disaster preparedness becomes dicier. Southeast Alaska is wet and has steep mountains, which are pretty much exactly the conditions that produce landslides. These deadly disasters have affected many municipalities across the region. In response, Alaskans teamed up with soil scientists to implement a system of soil moisture sensors and rain gauges that can serve as an early warning system. Human action on the environment has had an impact; one study looked at the connection between logging and landslides, and found that 50 percent of slides happened in areas that had been logged within the past year.

Christian Elliott, Sierra Magazine

Scam Industry

The world’s eyes are on Cambodia right now, in no small part because massive industrial scam centers staffed by over 100,000 trafficked and forced laborers continue to rip off people worldwide for billions of dollars in revenue a year. This is a legitimately massive industry for Cambodia, and the architects of the scam operations have cozied up to the government. In October, the U.S. and British governments sanctioned Chen Zhi and his Prince Group, whom the governments allege to be the kingpin and conglomerate behind the scam engine. However, both Zhi and Prince Group maintain tight ties to the government of Cambodia. The U.S. seized $15 billion from Zhi, which would beat the $12.6 billion demanded from El Chapo. Why does Cambodia’s leadership still back him? Well, the $12.5 billion estimated size of the scam business is larger than the $9 billion garment industry that constitutes the core of the legitimate Cambodian economy. And leadership presumably understands what happens to countries that crack down on the illicit but lucrative parts of their economy (see: opium in Afghanistan circa 2000).

Jack Adamović Davies, Foreign Policy

Vultures

In India, the population of three species of vulture dropped calamitously from 1992 to 2007, with the population dropping from four million birds to just 32,000, one of the swiftest declines of any bird population. That has had a devastating impact on the human population, as well, and is linked to tens of thousands of deaths. See, the vultures compete with wild dogs for dead cattle — vultures can pick a carcass clean in 30 to 40 minutes — and when the vulture population collapsed, the dog population exploded. When the population of dogs increasing by 5.5 million, the number of dog bites increasing by 38 million, resulting in 47,000 extra human deaths from rabies thereafter. A newer analysis published in the American Economic Review looked at even more reverberations from the demise of the vulture. It found that India suffered an estimated 104,386 additional deaths annually as a result of water contamination and disease, thanks to the removal of the scavengers from the ecosystem.

Mark Johnson and Saumya Khandelwal, The Washington Post

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