Numlock News: January 16, 2026 • Late Night, Salt Lake, Beetles
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
Oranges
The first forecast of Florida’s 2025-26 orange growing season from the USDA projects the state to produce 12 million boxes of oranges, down two percent year over year. It is the single worst output since 1930 as the groves of the Sunshine State have been decimated by citrus greening disease. That is a sharp fall from the 242 million boxes of oranges produced as recently as 2004. While the state once produced oranges for all uses, they are mostly destined for juicing. American production remains flat year over year, thanks only to California, which increased production one percent to 45.5 million boxes. None of this scarcity will hit the consumer, though: orange juice futures fell 7.4 percent Monday to $1.8865 per pound amid a production rebound in Brazil that has futures trading at 60 percent the level seen in December 2024.
Terahertz
It is very difficult for astronomers to scan the terahertz frequencies between infrared and radio waves because water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere absorbs them. Astronomers in China have managed to make it work by putting a terahertz telescope in the driest place on Earth, but it wasn’t easy. The instrument, the Antarctic Terahertz Explorer, has a 60-centimeter dome and has been painstakingly hauled out to Dome A, the highest point on a plateau four kilometers above sea level on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The 1,228-kilometer trip from Zhongshan Station to Dome A took two weeks by tracked vehicle. The ATE60 is the first step of many, as the Chinese Academy of Sciences has agreed to fund at least two one-meter telescopes at Dome A.
Late Night
Historically, late-night talk shows were major avenues for bands to reach a large national audience. While their cultural domination has waned, there are still clear advantages for a band that hits it big on a late show. A 2020 analysis found that bookings on Colbert were good for a five percent juice in streams following a performance, and artists sought them out not only as a matter of prestige but as a way of securing future bookings on tour dates. That said, music on late shows has become a victim of slashed budgets and cancelled programming. The latest blow is Jimmy Kimmel Live! planning to pull back on the number of musical acts featured each week. The number of late-night performance opportunities has dropped sharply, from 17 to 21 per week in 2023 to a maximum of eight right now. Once The Late Show with Stephen Colbert wraps, that number will decrease to only six per week. The fear is that those spots will go to established artists as competition gets more intense for the bookings.
Ethan Millman, The Hollywood Reporter
Sora 2
While interest in OpenAI’s video generation platform Sora 2 was intense, app download data appears to show interest in the app falling off sharply after the splashy launch. While it only took five days for Sora 2 to achieve one million downloads on iOS, downloads slowed down significantly, with 5 million downloads spread out over the following three months. For perspective, in December alone, TikTok was downloaded north of 18 million times, and YouTube — which has been an app for two decades — was downloaded 5 million times.
Ryan Broderick and Adam Bumas, Sherwood News
2 Salt 2 Lake
A team of hydrologists working with the USGS and Utah Geological Society has investigated a large aquifer of fresh water beneath Utah’s Great Salt Lake. The possibly vast reservoir of pressurized freshwater is the result of millennia of snowmelt. It is found in sediment pores in a basin underneath a nine-meter-thick salty layer. The Great Salt Lake is rather young, taking its current shape 8,000 years ago as the remnant of Lake Bonneville — a massive freshwater lake leftover from the Ice Age that covered most of the area northwest of Utah until it was released in a cataclysmic flood 16,800 years ago.
Brian Maffly, University of Utah
Bugs
A new study published in Nature Communications found that invasive species can be especially devastating for native insects. The average reduction of hemiptera insects (the true bugs) was 58 percent, down 37 percent among hymenoptera (ants, bees and bugs like them), orthoptera (grasshoppers et al.) 27 percent and coleoptera (beetles) 12 percent. Those four orders account for 62 percent of all insect species, but let’s be honest here, the coleoptera are pulling most of that weight. As we all know, God’s favorite creature is beetles, and everything else is just a side project to cater to them. While invasive species have long been of massive concern, their impact on insects had not yet been adequately studied.
UK Center for Ecology and Hydrology
Bottom Of The Barrel
Silicon Valley Bank has long been a key financier and market analyst of the California wine industry, and its annual report is a must-read for oenophiles. The issue, however, is that those oenophiles have been down significantly in number. As a result, the wine industry’s been in a bad place for some time. That being said, the latest 2026 State of the U.S. Wine Industry Report points to an end to the spiral, projecting that the industry will hit the floor in 2027 or 2028 and then steadily rebound as we approach 2040. The salvation comes in the form of the second derivative, as the rate of decline seen in 2025 was lower than feared. The volume of cases sold in the U.S. is down only 2.05 percent year over year, and revenueis dropping just 1.6 percent.
This past week in the Sunday Edition, I spoke to Christian Elliott who wrote Where The Prairie Still Remains for Noēma. Check out what one loyal reader called “I don’t say this lightly, but this is a top 5 Sunday edition.”
Numlock Sunday: Christian Elliott on the hidden pockets of a lost ecosystem
We spoke about pioneer cemeteries, American wildflowers that could only be obtained from the Netherlands, and how to re-wild one roadside at a time.
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