Numlock News: January 15, 2025 • Lazarus, Diamond, Nightmares
By Walt Hickey
Crypto
An exciting start-up managed to post impressive revenues of $659 million in crypto, showing that the digital currency revolution is totally changing the game. The group is known as “Lazarus Group” and they’re a plucky outfit out of tech hotspot North Korea, with an innovative and cutting-edge business model of “stealing bitcoin.” The crypto industry has been extensively targeted by the DPRK, which has used phishing tactics and impersonating of workers in order to sneak into internal systems of the industry and extract digital funds.
Little Red Dots
The James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered all sorts of neat new findings in its attempt to probe the early cosmos, and one of the most mysterious observations has been a phenomenon described as “little red dots,” which have light signatures that are difficult to explain and increasingly appear to be a very common feature of the earliest universe. A team of researchers looking at 341 of them found they existed beginning when the universe was 600 million years old and then disappeared by roughly 1.5 billion years after, after which they’re not really seen, meaning that either they become something else (maybe the core of a galaxy, for instance) or they just go away.
Variants
For years, music distributors have squeezed a little extra money out of fans by releasing many different versions of physical media, a strategy to appeal to the collectors among fans. A standard release can get intense: When Linkin Park released From Zero in 2024, they dropped the record with 17 alternate physical versions, including 11 vinyl LPs, three CDs, one CD box set and two cassettes, a suite of products that pushed the album to No. 1 on the rock album charts. That’s not even an extreme case — Utopia by Travis Scott had 31 variants. In 2019, the top 10 albums on the Billboard 200 averaged 3.3 different physical album versions. As of the end of 2023, that was up to 8.9 versions. In the aggregate, the plan is working — over the period, LP sales increased from 18.8 million to 49.6 million — but at some point you must wonder when you’re going to find diminishing returns.
Steel
The United States steel industry recycles junk steel with electric arc furnaces that pull out the valuable metal, a process that’s responsible for 70 percent of American steel. The discarded waste dust from this process contains any incinerated plastics or other metals, and is itself somewhat valuable. The electric arc furnace dust is shipped from facilities in the United States to a facility in Mexico in Monterray, which received 200,000 tons of the dust in 2022 alone. There, it is processed and zinc is reclaimed from the industrial byproduct. The problem, though — and the center of a new investigation — is that the extraction process is intensively polluting to the surrounding environment, which sees dangerously elevated levels of lead, cadmium and arsenic released in the form of fine dust in a region with some 5.3 million people. One elementary school a kilometer away from the plant found levels of lead in a windowsill swipe at 1,760 times the U.S. action level.
Erin McCormick and Verónica García de León, The Guardian and Quinto Elemento Lab
Recurring Dreams
About 75 percent of adults experience at least one recurring dream during their lifetime. Sometimes it’s a completely identical dream night after night, while other times it’s more a loose interpretation of a couple of reliable themes and settings or characters. Experts don’t have a ton of insight as to why this kind of stuff keeps happening, but research does bear out the idea that recurring dreams tend to be negative more often than not. One survey found that adults flagged their recurring dreams as “negatively toned” around two-thirds of the time, and often involved being chased, arriving late or failing. Apparently, the pandemic also made peoples’ dreams weirder, based on an analysis of over 15,000 dream reports studied scientifically that found themes involving fear, illness and death were two to four times more common in dreams after the pandemic compared to before.
Amanda Heidt, Scientific American
Diamond’s In The Rough
In a major moment of upheaval for the comic book industry, Diamond Comic Distributors — the crucial intermediary between the many companies that produce comics and the vast number of stores that sell them — has filed for Chapter 11 protection. It’s been a complicated couple of years for Diamond, which as recently as 2019 was generally considered to possess a benevolent monopoly on distribution for the industry as a whole after about two decades serving as the exclusive distributor of all DC, Marvel, Image and other comics. The pandemic saw a major shake-up: As of September 2023, DC took its 29 percent marketshare to upstart Lunar and Universal, Image took its 8 percent to Lunar with Diamond only as a wholesaler, and Marvel, IDW and Dark Horse jumped over to Penguin Random House with their combined 47 percent market share, leaving Diamond just 16 percent of the exclusive business, down from 100 percent.
John Jackson Miller, Comichron
Tattoos
Using fluorescent laser imaging, scientists have been able to get some really stunning imagery of tattoos on the skin of mummies of people who belonged to the Chancay civilization, which existed along the coast of Peru from 900 to 1533. The researchers shined the light onto the skin of over 100 mummified individuals to try to make sense of lines that had since deteriorated into blobs. They found remarkable precision on the tattoos, with some lines between 0.1 and 0.2 millimeters thick, narrower than modern tattoo needles.
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Corrected to disambiguate when the little red dots disappeared.
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For someone with relatively little interest in astronomy, I sure love the James Webb Telescope. I think it’s such a marvel of human ingenuity and persistence and sharing. It represents the best of us. Thanks for keeping us abreast of its discoveries!
I’m envisioning Little Red Dots as a desert menu item at a high-end restaurant.