Numlock News: December 4, 2025 • Fabergé, Theia, Gallium

Dec 04, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Rare

Rare earth metals are living up to their name, with geopolitical tensions and export restrictions in China sending the prices of crucial metal components in electronics way up. The price of dysprosium is up to $910 per kilogram in Europe as of last week, triple the pre-export restrictions price. The price of terbium hit $3,700 per kilogram, quadruple the previous rate. The benchmark price for gallium has reached $1,325 per kilogram, which is 2.3 times the price at the beginning of the year and the highest price on record. For context, China produces 99 percent of the world’s gallium.

Shugo Yamada, Nikkei Asia

Man In The Middle

Home fixtures company Kohler released a smart camera, the Dekoda, that attaches inside a toilet bowl and takes pictures of what its customers deposit within the bowl. Kohler claims the camera does this in order to assess gut health. This opened up a whole world of somewhat concerning questions — I have long been perturbed by the idea that somewhere there are a number of AWS servers existing solely to identify and interpret excrement. I fear they might do this to assist robotic vacuums in evading pet messes, an existential nightmare from which it is entirely understandable one might provoke a robot revolution. However, this is not why the new $599 device (and $6.99 per month thereafter) is in the news. No, it is because a security researcher has reported that (despite the company claiming otherwise) the data sent from the poop camera is not, in fact, end-to-end encrypted. It merely has TLS encryption, and Kohler can indeed see the imagery produced by its rear-end users.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, TechCrunch

Fabergé

A crystal and diamond Fabergé egg known as the Winter Egg sold for 22.9 million pounds at Christie’s, the most expensive Fabergé egg ever sold at auction. The Winter Egg was one of about 50 produced by the House of Fabergé for the Romanov dynasty. Seven of those eggs have been lost since the Russian Revolution, and there are only seven in private hands. The Winter Egg was commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II for 24,600 roubles as a gift to the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, who got an egg every year from her husband, Alexander III. When the Soviets took over, the egg was sold for 450 pounds to a British antique dealer.

Anny Shaw, The Art Newspaper

Robots

Malaysia has made a deal with Texas-based seabed mapping company Ocean Infinity to once again resume the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared in 2014 over the southern Indian Ocean. The mission is unique: Malaysia has to pay up to $70 million only if the company actually produces substantive wreckage. Ocean Infinity will spend 55 days sweeping a 15,000 square kilometer region of the ocean using uncrewed ships. These unmanned ships coordinate multiple autonomous underwater vehicles that can map terrain to a depth of 6,000 meters with sonar.

Eric Sullivan, Scientific American

Corn

About 90 million acres of the United States has got corn on it — a region about the size of Montana. About 40 percent of the corn crop goes towards producing ethanol. The Renewable Fuel Standard, passed in the mid-2000s, required gasoline to include ethanol, and that ethanol is from corn. As priorities shifted away from reducing demand on foreign oil and towards addressing the climate, the question arose of whether it’s actually best to spend all that time and money and chemicals and acreage on growing corn to offset the use of fossil fuels. The Renewable Fuels Association claims that ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent to 50 percent compared to gasoline. Other research counters that the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the Renewable Fuel Standard is actually likely 24 percent higher than gasoline. However, other researchers dispute that. Still, it’s a lot of acreage: one new study found that solar panels would generate as much energy as corn ethanol on just three percent of the land that corn takes up.

Ames Alexander, Floodlight

Photobomb

A new study published in Nature by NASA researchers attempts to predict the future of astronomy from low-Earth orbit telescopes. Specifically, as it relates to the large constellations of communications satellites going up into the sky. According to the analysis, if the proposed series of low-Earth orbit constellations indeed does come to pass, a third of the images from the Hubble Space Telescope will be contaminated with a neighboring satellite streaking across the shot. That’s actually better than several other telescopes will fare; the SPHEREx, ARRAKIHS and Xuntian space telescopes will have over 96 percent of their exposures affected. Mitigating the issue is indeed possible, and proposed fixes include limiting reflexivity and identifying an upper limit for the orbits of large satellite constellations.

Alejandro S. Borlaff, Pamela M. Marcum & Steve B. Howell, Nature

Theia(s)

The leading idea for how our moon came to be is that a large object the size of Mars, known as Theia, impacted the Earth, ejecting debris into space that would eventually become the moon we all know and love. Key support for this theory is the fact that the moon and Earth are made out of similar stuff. But therein lies another question: if our moon was the result of a Theia collision with Earth, our moon would likely be mostly Theia, and thus would be compositionally different from the Earth. A new study proposes that a number of impacts over a few million years might actually be the cause, with each impact creating a small moonlet that combined into a large moon over thousands of years. Most previous models arguing for multiple impacts have put the number as high as 20, but this new model says that just three impacts could do the trick of getting enough mass into orbit to make the moon.

Jonathan O’Callaghan, New Scientist

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