Numlock News: February 5, 2026 • Olives, Jolly Rancher, Butterfat
By Walt Hickey
TV
Generic streaming boxes loaded up with apps that purport to grant the user access to television streams – some legitimate, others pirated — have become popular enough to become a thorn in the side of the cable business. SuperBox and its primary competition vSeeBox have inspired lawsuits against dealers and fans who are willing to pay the $300 to $400 upfront cost and the only month-to-month costs. These streaming boxes are bundling a suite of off-the-books streaming sites and piracy apps under a veneer of deniability. The result is a device that, when installed to recommended configurations, can access 6,000 to 8,000 channels, including premium sports and movie channels, many of which are generally held to be streaming out of China.
Olives
New research puts together a proposed timeline for the cultivation of olive trees in Italy, placing the first Italian olive oil at about 4,000 years ago. Ancient pollen placed olive trees in Italy 11,000 years ago, but those are probably wild olives. Charcoal from olive trees shows that the earliest Italians were at least burning the trees around 8,000 years ago in Sicily and Apulia. From 6000 to 3500 there’s evidence of more intensive use of the trees, and the first olive stones — darn good evidence that they were being consumed — come 5000 to 4000 BCE. The real evidence of cultivation is that around 1700 BCE we start seeing evidence of olives in areas that wild olives didn’t grown, such as in Tufariello, Campiana. Things caught on quick, though: by the time of the early Roman Empire in the first century CE, Rome’s immediate region was producing 9.7 million liters of olive oil per year.
Butterfat
Milk in the United States has transformed slowly but surely, and it’s causing problem for the cheese and butter supply chains. In 2000, the average dairy cow made 670 pounds of fat in her milk per year, a level which today stands at 1,025 pounds of fat per year. That’s a triumph of dairy science, but it’s caused an oversupply that’s crashing the price of butter. Milkfat had come in around 3.65 percent for decades, but that number rose sharply to 4.24 percent in 2024 — most of which is attributable to genetics. This is an issue for some cheese makers, as cheddar, Colby and Monterey Jack require lower fat-protein ratios. Makers now have to adjust their processing plants to remove the excess fat.
Ghrelin
Snakes don’t have the genes to produce ghrelin, which is a hormone that regulates appetite, according to a new report published in Royal Society Open Biology. Other reptiles that can go long periods of times between meals, such as chameleons and toadhead agamas, are also missing the genes. This is a sign that the creature’s able to fast extremely well are good at suppressing their appetites partly because they evolved without the gene that makes them hungry. The study was based on a scan of the genomes of 112 species, which found that the gherlin genes were missing or sufficiently disabled so as to no longer be able to encode the hormone.
Lloyd’s
The Lloyd’s of London insurance market has been especially busy lately thanks to the increased underwriting of war risk insurance. Overall, gross written premiums on the marketplace in 2024 were up to 55.5 billion pounds (US$76 billion), up 50 percent from five years earlier. Marine insurance and related fields — which included war risk insurance — was up 60 percent over the period, hitting 4.5 billion pounds.
Jolly Rancher
Jolly Rancher sales in 2024 hit $400 million, up 25 percent year over year, as demand for fruity flavors rose and confectioners tried to play up their non-chocolate offerings in light of high prices for cocoa. Hershey has also expanded the hard candy brand substantially, stretchig it into gummies, ropes, freeze-drie and even a spicy variety called Jolly Rancher Heat Wave Gummies coated what their legal department has decided to call “a chili-inspired finish.” Really, “chili-inspired” is a special kind of gustatory legal genius to describe a substance that, while irritating to the soft tissues of the mouth in that way today’s consumers crave, legally and chemically can’t actually be implied to be from a chili pepper.
Christopher Doering, Food Dive
Tiny
The global electric vehicle market is growing steadily and is now an $800 billion global business. That said, one tiny chunk of the market is yet to break out: the ultra-compact micro EVs, which account for just $11 billion of that. Global sales of Micro EVs are expected to stay flat at 1.4 million units this year. They’re more interesting to designers than they are to consumers, it would appear. Of the 785 electric car models available worldwide in 2024, about 78 were micro EVs. However, despite accounting for about 10 percent of models, micro EVs they accounted for only about one percent of vehicles rolling off the lot. The bind comes because they’re an awkward middle ground between cars and scooters.
Ananya Bhattacharya, Rest of World
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One day, I would love an electric car, but I do a lot of driving for my job, so until they invent an electric car that can go 500+ miles on a single battery charge, I'm not buying one.
Cheese and olive plate for dinner with a Jolly Rancher for desert….