Numlock News: December 5, 2025 • Peaks, Stomata, Plasma

By Walt Hickey

Hop Water

First introduced in 2014 by a home brewer, hop water is sparkling water flavored with hops, a non-alcoholic beverage that has some of the fun flavor spectrum of beer. It has not really taken off to the extent that many other NA beverages have; while the nonalcoholic segment is poised to reach $1 billion by the end of the year, hop water only generated $28.5 million in sales. Those numbers are also declining. Sales of nonalcoholic beer are rising 18 percent over the year ending mid-October, while hop water sales declined 7.3 percent in that same period. Not to mention, hopes that the hop water business might be a beneficiary of the THC beverage trend were scuttled by a new federal law.

Laurel Deppen, Food Dive

Plasma

The market for plasma-derived medicinal products is projected to rise 38 percent in the five-year period from 2022 to 2027, reaching $46 billion. The plasma supply generally comes from people in the United States who are paid to sell their plasma, because the rest of the world bans paying people for blood. That means that 70 percent of the global supply of plasma comes from about 3 million people in the U.S. Business is great: the number of plasma collection centers tripled to over 1,200 from 2011 to 2024, with four large companies — Australia’s CSL Behring, Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Switzerland’s Octapharma AG and Spain’s Grifols SA — operating 85 percent of those locations, four multinationals who realize that in America, there’s gold in them there veins.

Paul Tullis, Bloomberg

Hand Talking

A new study analyzed 200,000 video segments from over 2,000 TED talks to determine the impact that hand gestures had on audience reaction. Based on both an analysis of the 33 million video likes as well as an experiment where 1,600 participants rated the speakers, the study found that those who used illustrative gestures over the course of the talk were reliably rated as more “clear, competent and persuasive.” However, not all movements were helpful — random waving, fidgeting and pointing to things did not offer benefits — but gestures visually expressing phrases, like spreading one’s hands apart when they are saying something is far away, were helpful.

Giovanni Luca Cascio Rizzo, The Conversation

Trees

Tree farms in the United States cut down 14.5 million Christmas trees in 2022, according to the most recent USDA data. At any given time, there are 300 million Christmas trees growing on 15,000 farms across the country. Michigan, North Carolina and Oregon are the biggest producers of the trees, with these three states boasting an aggregate of 400 square miles of land devoted to their production. Of the 14.5 million trees cut in 2022, half came from just six counties, with Clackamas County, Oregon, responsible for a nation-leading 2,088,169 trees alone.

Joe Murphy, NBC News

Reactors

As we enter winter, it’s once again time to throw some atoms on the reactor and listen to them crackle, as nuclear power plants are coming back online and running at near full capacity for the season. In general, summer and winter are the most energy-intensive times of the year. After all, we do have a desire to make the temperature inside our homes bearable despite whatever thermodynamic conditions might exist elsewhere. Commercial nuclear reactors run at constant levels and do so at pretty much full capacity; the average capacity factor of a nuclear facility worldwide was 83 percent, but in North America, that gets up to about 90 percent. The downtime — reactors need refueling every 18 to 24 months — is therefore scheduled for spring and autumn. On July 28, reactors in the U.S. operated at 99.6 percent, but on October 18, that was 77.6 percent as some of the reactor fleet was offline for maintenance.

Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review

Stomata

Researchers have honed in on the pores of plants as a potential avenue to make them more resilient towards drought. The stomata of plants are tiny pores that open and close. When open, they allow the necessary carbon dioxide in to facilitate photosynthesis, but they also allow water vapor to escape. With continued global warming, the plants’ current stomata strategy could be the thing that kills them, as it may let too much water out. Amounts of carbon dioxide in the air have increased from 280 parts per million to 422 parts per million, and the hope was that plants would open their stomata less often. And that hope does appear to hold up, though droughts did cause problems for the plants. A new report hones in on a gene called EPF1 that regulates the number of stomata. The thinking goes that fewer stomata would mean better water efficiency. Modifying the gene in the sorghum plant reduced the number of stomata by 30 percent to 60 percent, which led to a commensurate drop in water loss on the order of 30 percent to 34 percent, without limiting growth.

Tim Vernimmen, Knowable Magazine

14er

There are 58 peaks in Colorado that are over 14,000 feet tall, and that fact has sent avid climbers scrambling to reach the top of all the 14ers. Two peaks — Crestone and East Crestone — are both over 14,000 feet, but it’s long been held that East Crestone is merely a sub-peak of the taller Crestone since the saddle between them is so short. Therefore, most Pakbaggers only climb Crestone, which sees hundreds of ascents per year. A new analysis dragged a bunch of sophisticated survey equipment to the peaks. This came after the reveal that a LiDAR analysis awarded Crestone the win based on just a 3-4 foot spike, which might very well have just been a person. The East Crestone also has a sharp boulder on the summit, which LiDAR might have missed. It turns out that East Crestone is 0.3 feet (0.09 meters) taller than Crestone, with 99.9 percent confidence that it’s taller. This has prompted new questions, such as whether this means that East Crestone should be added to the list and make it 59, or just replace Crestone on the list and keep it 58. Please adjust your mountain-climbing plans accordingly.

Eric Gilbertson, The Conversation

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Correction: An earlier version misprinted the meter conversion of 0.3 feet.

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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.

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