Numlock News: February 20, 2025 • Tootsie Rolls, Thutmose II, Lobsters
By Walt Hickey
Blow Pops
Tootsie Roll Industries saw sales drop 6.3 percent last year to $715.5 million, attributing it to higher prices for candies. Cocoa and chocolate costs have increased, which has caused margin issues for the company. This, I must admit, comes as a shock to me. I, for one, am surprised that tootsie roles actually contain flavors and substances originating from plants, let alone bonafide cocoa. Either way, the pinch has the company looking to invest in its non-chocolate related businesses, which is one reason its subsidiary Charms is investing $97.7 million to build an expansion to the factory where Blow Pops are manufactured.
Four Nations
Thursday will see the conclusion of the wildly successful Four Nations tournament, a hockey contest between Sweden, Finland, Canada and the United States that has become must-watch television. The United States-Canada game immediately exploded into several brawls, in no small part due to the unfortunate stoking of geopolitical tensions across North America. But one can’t discredit the longstanding hockey rivalry between the countries finally coming to a point where both national teams are outstanding at the same time. In the grand history of international competition, Canada has smoked the U.S., winning 119 games, losing 48 times and notching 21 ties, a win percentage of 68.9 percent. Lately, though, the American team has begun to even up the contest, and the overall goal differential between the countries has been fairly flat for the past two decades. Needless to say, the final — a rematch between Canada and the United States — is a must-watch.
Museum
The Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris is closing for several weeks as part of a year-long renovation, as annual visitors hit 1.2 million despite a designed capacity intended for about 600,000 per year. The facility is the latest iteration of the Orangery for the kings of France, which fell out of use after the French established the separation of state and neck in 1793. Today, it is best known as the home of eight Water Lillies panels by Claude Monet. One issue prompting the renovation is the dust, which visitors track into the building when coming in from the adjoining spacious garden, the Tuileries Gardens. They bring in the garden’s iconic mix of gravel, sand and whitewash for footpaths. This incidentally becomes a potent and omnipresent dust, a problem for the museum so severe that in 2013, they considered throwing 15 million euros towards renovations to expel the volatile powder. As part of this new closure, architects are installing revolving doors and a vacuum system to reduce the impact of the stabilisé.
Dale Berning Sawa, The Art Newspaper
Life Is Quite Troubled, Down Where It Bubbled, Under The Sea
The American lobster population is in trouble, issues mostly stemming from juveniles failing to survive to adulthood despite the overall adult population of lobsters doing fine. Lobsters can live to 100, but if they’re not making it past crustacean adolescence, that’s going to lead to problems down the line. Researchers found it likely wasn’t an issue of predation — as nothing seemed to be eating the larval lobsters — but rather an issue with C. finmarchicus, a single-celled zooplankton that is rich in protein and fat, a crucial source of nutrients for the young lobsters. Warming temperatures have meant that the lobsters are hatching earlier and that the seasonal spawning cycle of the zooplankton is truncated. Consequently, abundance is down 70 percent during the larval season. As a result, baby lobsters are increasingly missing out on the bonanza that once was C. finmarchicus season.
Coins
A new study analyzed the impacts of Roman silver production to find that, yes, they did essentially cause a massive lead poisoning incident by accident. Romans made coins by extracting silver by melting down the ore galena. This produces lots of lead as a byproduct. Researchers found that the then-airborne lead drifted north and could still be found in ice cores from Greenland and Russia. Lead production peaked during the Pax Romana, an era where 3,300 to 4,600 tons of lead were emitted from Rome annually. This is good for a blood lead level of around 2 micrograms to 5 micrograms per deciliter, which research indicates will ding you for around 3 IQ points.
Aylin Woodward, The Wall Street Journal
CaO
Left alone, alkaline rocks like magnesium silicates will suck up carbon dioxide, permanently locking it away. As a species that has pushed out a lot of carbon dioxide, this is good news. The issue is this weathering takes millennia to accomplish, which — as a species with lifespans less than that — is bad news. However, a new study found that calcium silicates, when heated alongside those magnesium silicates, were pretty good at capturing CO2 at a faster clip, and one proposed course of action could get the cost of carbon dioxide removal down to $100 per ton.
Thutmose II
Egyptologists announced that they had finally discovered the tomb of King Thutmose II, which is both the first tomb of a pharaoh discovered since Tutankhamun in 1922, as well as the last undiscovered royal tomb of the 18th Egyptian dynasty. The remains of Thutmose II were found two centuries ago — he’s currently in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, just as Anubis intended — but the original burial site had been a mystery. Thutmose II ruled from 1493 to 1479 BCE, but he’s best known as a wife guy, as Queen Hatshepsut is generally regarded as one of the only female pharaohs to rule in her own right and also one of the greatest pharaohs.
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This is hilarious to me: "This, I must admit, comes as a shock to me. I, for one, am surprised that tootsie roles actually contain flavors and substances originating from plants, let alone bonafide cocoa."
Because as I was reading the first sentence, I thought, "There's _chocolate_ in Tootsie Rolls?" God those things are gross. But my idea for them is to simply stop *using* chocolate. Who would know the difference? Boom, profit!