Numlock News: December 24, 2025 • Snow Crab, Chenille, Loons

Dec 24, 2025

By Walt Hickey

This is the final Numlock of 2025! Thank you so much for reading, we’re off for the next few days. We will return to your inbox on January 5. Happy holidays, and have a great new year!

Cars

The price of new vehicles in the United States is up 33 percent since 2020. As of November, the average monthly payment for a new car clocked in at $760. To ease the pain of getting someone into the driver’s seat of a luxury behemoth, auto lenders have devised new loan structures that move the schedule. Loans now run way past the standard 48 months and 60 months and into 72 months or more, which in the third quarter accounted for a third of all buyers. In fact, 1.61 percent of buyers somehow talked themselves into a car loan that lasts for 96 months, or eight years.

Ryan Felton, The Wall Street Journal

Crab

The trendy ingredient on high-end menus these days is crab, especially the rarities imported from Japan. King crab is now going wholesale for $70 to $85 per pound, which would put retail consumers at a price north of $1,200 for a 10-pound Norwegian red king crab. There’s no real way for the crabs to get cheaper, for that matter; you can’t farm a king crab, and the ocean conditions they find hospitable are not getting more common. Some particularly elite restaurants are securing true rarities: Taiza gani, a snow crab found off the coast of Kyoto. The species is known as the “phantom crab,” and only five boats are permitted to fish for it. The crab is flown into New York for two nights only at a restaurant in Tribeca, where the tasting menu went for $1,295.

Matthew Kronsberg, Bloomberg

Suez

The CMA CGM Jacques Saade sailed through the Suez Canal southbound. This is a new milestone for a maritime route that has recently begun to recover from dangerous conditions in the Red Sea. In 2023, Yemen’s Houthi movement commenced attacks on commercial vessels, which made container ships from Asia bound for Europe bail on the Suez Canal in favor of longer voyages around Africa. That sent traffic through the Suez — which ordinarily handles around 12 percent of seaborne trade — plunging by around 60 percent. The Jacques Saade is capable of carrying 23,000 containers, well beating the 6,500 TEU Maersk Sebarok and 15,500 TEU CMA CGM Adonis, which made the transit recently.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Species

A new study published in Science Advances found that scientists are discovering new species faster than ever, with 16,000 new species discovered annually. Studying the taxonomic histories of two million species, the study determined that between 2015 and 2020, researchers were averaging over 10,000 newly described animals, 2,500 new plants and 2,000 fungi annually. The good news is that it does outpace the other side of the ledger, with about 10 species going extinct annually. This also leads to the interesting question of how many species are yet outstanding and undiscovered. Researchers projected that there may be 115,000 fish species and 41,000 amphibian species total, considerably higher than the 42,000 fish and 9,000 amphibian species currently known. That’s not to mention 6 million total insect species, well over the 1.1 million currently known insects.

Kylianne Chadwick, University of Arizona

Words

A 2018 study looked at words that had major differences between the percentage of men and the percentage of women who know them, and a new survey dives deep into the extent to which there’s a gender gap in some vocabulary. Words disproportionately known by women include chenille (44 percent of women vs 20 percent of men), doula (44 percent vs. 18 percent), tulle (41 percent vs 19 percent), taffeta and sateen (both 37 percent vs. 19 percent) and verbena (36 percent vs. 11 percent). Others with that skew include jacquard, damask, bandeau and espadrille. Male-skewing words included howitzer (47 percent of men vs 25 percent of women), yakuza (40 percent vs 19 percent), strafe (36 percent vs 18 percent), parsec (30 percent vs 14 percent) and servo (28 percent vs 8 percent), as well as gauss, katana and azimuth.

David Montgomery, YouGov

Go, Tigers

A new study published in BioScience analyzed professional sports teams in 43 countries across five continents. It found that 25 percent of pro sports teams had a wild animal in their name, logo or nickname, with the most commonly represented beasts including lions, tigers, wolves, leopards and brown bears. It’s not just the popular animals, either, as the study identified 160 different types of animals. That said, 27 percent of animal species in sports identities were at risk of extinction, which affects 59 percent of professional teams, and 64 percent of teams had an emblem of a species in decline. It can be hard to root for a team with an extinct mascot; I think I speak for all New York football fans when I say that the incident with Jack and the legumes was entirely avoidable and regrettable.

Ugo Arbieu and Franck Courchamp, The Conversation

Loony

The common loon is a bird that only started repopulating New England in the late 20th century after being killed off for 300 years. One problem quickly emerged: loons eat pebbles to digest food in their gizzard. Unfortunately, years of fishing and hunting had put lead sinkers and bullets all over the waterfronts of New England, so the birds were eating those and dying shortly thereafter of lead poisoning. A loon that eats a one-ounce lead sinker will die in about two to four weeks. New Hampshire has taken significant action on this, first orchestrating a lead tackle buyback program — since 2018, people have dropped off 80,000 pieces of lead tackle, some 172 pounds of lead in 2024 alone. In the state, lead-related loon deaths have dropped 34 percent since then.

Krista Langlois, bioGraphic

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