Numlock News: December 9, 2025 • Fly Casual, Cyclades, Shipyards
By Walt Hickey
Dementia
Japan spent 9 trillion yen (about US$58 billion) on dementia-related health and social care costs this year, and that’s projected to rise to 14 trillion yen (US$90 billion) by 2030. Elderly people make up 30 percent of Japan’s population (a ratio behind only Monaco), and with a shrinking workforce and limits on foreign workers, it’s a famously hard problem to solve. Last year, over 18,000 older people with dementia left their homes and went missing, a figure double the level of 2012. One increasingly popular technological solution is GPS tags that can alert authorities when a person leaves a designated area.
Obits
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed 38 million obituaries published from 1998 to 2024 to find the most commonly cited attributes of a worthy life. It found that the most prevalent value in an obit was tradition — such as a religious belief — as well as benevolence, with those two values appearing in about 70 percent of obituaries. The role of major events had some effect on the prevalence of different values; interestingly, references to achievement declined after the 2008 financial crisis.
Stylianos Syropoulos, David Markowitz, and Kyle Fiore Law, The Conversation
Aegean
A major archeological undertaking called The Small Cycladic Islands Project studied 87 uninhabited islands from The Cyclades, which are a group of 200 islands southeast of mainland Greece. The researchers used LIDAR and magnetometry to determine whether the now-uninhabited islands were ever home to people in the past. The research subsequently led to the entire island of Polyaigos being protected as an archaeological site. One of the techniques, magnetometry, measured the ground’s magnetic signature, which allowed archeologists to spot unique elements like stone walls, ancient lightning strikes and human activity that might affect soil magnetics. They found evidence of artifacts from prehistory as well as data from the colonization of the Cyclades during the Neolithic period.
Shipbuilding
The United States is strengthening its economic links with South Korea in the field of shipbuilding, where it has lagged behind the rest of the world. In 2024, China’s shipbuilding output was up 18 percent year over year and was good for a 53 percent market share when it comes to compensated gross tonnage. South Korea, though considerably smaller economically, is nevertheless a major contender in shipbuilding, with shipyard output increasing 22 percent year over year and good for a 28 percent market share. South Korea’s shipyards — among them HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, Hanwha Ocean and Samsung Heavy Industries — produce high-value vessels. However, the industry is still recovering from a 2014 market downturn that halved the shipbuilding workforce from 203,000 to 92,000.
Casual
The secretary of transportation’s fixation on casual dressing among air travelers is at the bottom of Americans’ list of concerns by any metric. A new poll found just eight percent of respondents consider it a major problem, and only 22 percent even dignified it by calling it a minor problem. Many consider it the lowest level of concern (30 percent) among several dozen other issues regarding flights. Bigger issues include high ticket prices (84 percent consider it a problem), air traffic control staffing shortages (73 percent), uncomfortable seating (81 percent), delays and cancellations (80 percent), long security lines (78 percent), excessive security restrictions (58 percent), turbulence (65 percent), poor entertainment options (47 percent) and inadequate wifi (51 percent). In a bit of a twist, it seems like we actually have solved a problem; airline food is actually considered to be rather good these days, with people holding it to be an issue no longer in the majority.
Fentanyl
ARMR Sciences will begin a Phase 1/2 trial on an experimental vaccine for the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is currently the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45. Naloxone is a treatment that can reverse an overdose, and distributing that medication widely led to a 24 percent decline in overdose deaths in 2024. The vaccine being developed is based on work from the University of Houston, which developed an adjuvant that blocked 92 percent to 98 percent of fentanyl from entering the brain in rats, with the effect lasting at least 20 weeks.
Congestion
New York City’s implementation of a fee to enter the most traffic-burdened parts of the city has also substantially reduced air pollution, with congestion pricing reducing particulate matter that is 2.5 micrometers or smaller by 22 percent within the area below 60th street in Manhattan. This is based on an analysis of data from 42 air quality monitors over 518 days that produced 17,758 observations. Fewer cars on the road in Manhattan has even improved conditions in the city as a whole, with the study finding average particulate matter declines of 1.07 micrograms per cubic meter throughout the five boroughs; the World Health Organization recommends an average annual exposure of just 5 micrograms per cubic meter.
David Nutt, Cornell University
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Wow. That fentanyl vaccine could completely change things for the better. I worked at a behavioral health hospital for 10 years, and when fentanyl came on the scene things got so scary, not just for the people who use drugs, but also for the people in contact with them and their belongings. So many lives could be saved.