Numlock News: December 23, 2025 • Grizzly Bears, Gravity Lens, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa

Dec 23, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Just a heads up that tomorrow is the final Numlock of the year! Just when I got used to writing “2025.” Thanks for reading for another spin of the sun.

Rates

Electricity rate structures are poised to go from obscure state capitol negotiations to national spotlight appearances as costs rise to prominence, particularly as a wave of high-power demand data centers comes online and causes a supply crunch. The average residential utility rate increased five percent from 2024 to 2025, and it is projected to rise another four percent from 2025 to 2026. Based on the more variable monthly data, rates are up 12.5 percent since January. Utilities got a green light for $34 billion in new rates in the first three quarters of the year, up substantially from $16 billion over the same period of 2024.

Jason Plautz, E&E News

Peak

We are careening towards Peak Mariah, with “All I Want for Christmas Is You” topping the Billboard Global 200 with 101.6 million streams in the week ending December 18 (up eight percent week over week). The rest of the top five are all Christmas songs except for “The Fate of Ophelia” by Taylor Swift. The biggest song when you exclude the United States is “Last Christmas” by Wham!, which racked up 64.7 million streams. In mere days, all of these songs will entirely disappear for months, but my god, the royalty checks must be incredible.

Gary Trust, Billboard

The Microsoft-owned professional networking service LinkedIn serves a common purpose for legions of users the world over: lots of job scams, no matter where you live. The platform nuked 80.6 million fake accounts at the point of registration in the second half of last year, which was up from 70.1 million accounts identified and removed in the prior six months. Job scams are common everywhere, but take on a unique local flavor depending on the desired mark. In Mexico, they advertise fake formal roles in a job economy otherwise defined by more informal arrangements, in Kenya, the currency of choice is fake personal referrals, in Nigeria, it’s all about conning people out of login credentials with the incentive of paid work. And in America, the real LinkedIn scam is that one guy who’s conspicuously good at the Mini Sudoku, you know the guy. Like, come on, how are you doing this in under a minute? My meaty thumbs don’t even move that fast. I’m impressed but certain that they’ve got to be cheesing it somehow.

Damilare Dosunmu, Rest of World

Atoms

Japan shuttered 54 nuclear reactors after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that caused a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. That’s led to energy problems in a famously energy resource-poor archipelago nation. However, slowly but surely, the government has been turning the plants back on. Japan has restarted 14 of the 33 reactors that remain operational. It also just took the final step to turn on the world’s largest nuclear power plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, 220 kilometers northwest of Tokyo and has a total capacity of 8.2 GW. The restart would reactivate the first of seven reactors — capable of generating 1.36 GW — as soon as January.

Kantaro Komiya, Katya Golubkova and Yuka Obayashi, Reuters

Wait Times

A new Inspector General report found significant differences between how long the Social Security Administration claims people wait on its phone lines and how long they actually do so. The cause of this discrepancy? The agency counts callers who immediately request a callback as having a wait time of zero. In reality, they waited one hour and 51 minutes for SSA to call them back. Among callers who did not take the callback option and waited to speak to an employee, they waited an average of 59 minutes. By claiming that the callback customers wait zero minutes, the SSA’s math says that the average wait time is 15.9 minutes. One cause for the wait times is the decreased staff and increased calls; as of June, staffing was down 13 percent in field offices compared to October 2024. Three percent of callers just get a busy signal, and 25 percent of calls — 21.3 million calls — are just abandoned, hanging up when stuck on hold.

Natalie Alms, Next Gov

Bears

The first-ever range-wide report about grizzly bear populations in the Lower 48 states found that the animals are continuing to recover, re-occupying four percent more habitat over the past two years. They’re now spread across a range-wide expansion of 2,250 square miles, or roughly 2/3rds of a Yellowstone. That said, the Yellowstone area proper actually saw a bit of a setback for the bears, with the 1,050 grizzlies in and around Yellowstone National Park occupying 3.5 percent less ground (963 square miles less) than they did two years back. Grizzly managers chalk that up to bears essentially reaching everywhere they can within the vicinity of Yellowstone, lacking any new neighboring big river valley to venture into.

Mike Koshmrl, WyoFile

Lensing

With conventional telescopes, it’s simply not possible to see distinguishing continents or oceans of a distant world. After all, a 10-by-10 pixel image requires a mirror that is 160 kilometers across to manage that feat of astronomy. Still, one possible strategy has been proposed using the Sun’s gravity as a lens. It is a theory similar to using other stars’ gravitational lenses to observe bent distant light coming from behind the star. The napkin sketch of the telescope would be a few telescopes with one-meter mirrors positioned 550 astronomical units away (three times the distance of Voyager 1). The telescope could, in theory, use the solar lens to get something like an 800-by-800 pixel image of an exoplanet, albeit one smeared across a one-kilometer Einstein ring that would have to be post-processed into an actual image. Still, neat stuff.

Daniel Clery, Science

If you subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! It’s fun, and supporters keep this thing ad-free. This is the best way to support something you like to read:

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian · Across the Movie Aisle · Radioactive Shrimp ·