Numlock News: January 17, 2025 • Forgeries, Foxes, Fungus
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
Walgreens
A Walgreens attempt to roll out tens of thousands of smart doors — essentially television screens behind freezer doors that could be used to advertise the contents within — has devolved into a fiasco, as the deal with Cooler Screens has gone to the courts over glitchy hardware. By the time Walgreens had installed 10,000 doors, and just as they were planning to get another 35,000 installed, the deal with Cooler Screens began to fall apart, and now Walgreens is getting sued for $200 million and Cooler Screens is insisting they keep the screens in place. According to Walgreens, each door only brought in $215 in revenue, or about 59 cents per day.
Basquiat
Two insurers are trying to block a $19.7 million claim lodged by the owners of dozens of forged paintings purported to be by Jean-Michel Basquiat. The insurers are trying to get a judgement saying that the policy doesn’t cover counterfeits, that they never technically insured Basquiats, and that the paintings — even if they’re just fakes — have not actually been damaged or destroyed. One of the giveaways that the paintings were faked was that the cardboard used in one of them came from a FedEx box with a typeface not used until 1994, six years after the artist’s death.
Mike Schneider, The Associated Press
Bloodletting
Sometimes the old ways are the best ways, as the recommendation for a number of people on the island of Jersey in the United Kingdom who suffer from PFAS contamination is, in fact, bloodletting. Turns out the therapy actually works pretty well for reducing the amount of so-called “forever chemicals” in a bloodstream, and runs at a cost of £200,000 per year to treat 50 people. The contamination stems from the use of firefighting foam that made its way into the water supply. Tests on 88 islanders found that 70 percent had high levels of perfluorohexanesulphonic acid, 30 percent had higher levels of perfluorooctane sulfonate, and 18 percent had high levels of perfluorooctanoic acid.
Leana Hosea and Rachel Salvidge, The Guardian
Fox
A new study looked at the unique behavior of arctic foxes and red foxes, which leap a foot into the air, dive face-first into snow at a speed of 10 miles per hour, and then try to catch prey. The technique, mousing, would seem likely to lead to head injuries, but it doesn’t, and researchers sought to find out why. They scanned a bunch of skulls and found that the foxes’ faces are really good at piercing into the snow, ensuring that it doesn’t compact and cause injuries to the head or, god forbid, the snout.
Aylin Woodward, The Wall Street Journal
Caterpillars
The larval stage of butterflies can occasionally be venomous, and what’s neat about it is that the presence of venom in the little guys — seen in about 2 percent of species of caterpillar — happens across all sorts of them and appears to have emerged multiple different times in the history of caterpillar evolution. That’s cool because it means there’s potentially an “unusual diversity” of the chemicals, and that might mean they can be used for all sorts of different applications, much in the same way that pharmaceuticals can be derived from naturally emerging chemicals.
Fungal
Cases of Valley fever have increased in the American Southwest, which is of particular concern because the respiratory illness results from an infection of Coccidioides, a fungus found in soil. Cases reported to the CDC increased from 2,800 annually in 2000 to roughly 20,000 in 2023, 97 percent of which are in Arizona and California. In Arizona, the prevalence is up 73 percent in 10 years to 146 cases per 100,000 people, while in California cases quadrupled over the same period to 23.2 cases per 100,000 people.
Indus
The Indus Valley Civilization started around 5,300 years ago in what’s now India and Pakistan, and was one of the earliest civilizations to have urban societies. They also had a script, which has frustrated linguists and archaeologists for more than a century. There are only around 4,000 samples of the script in existence, and they’re short, averaging only around five symbols per sample. There’s now an open contest with a $1 million prize to crack it. One team found that 67 signs account for 80 percent of the writing, which is promising evidence the script is indeed structured and there’s a logic going on here.
This week in the Sunday edition, a real treat, I spoke to Adam Chandler, author of the outstanding new book 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life, which is out as of this week. Our chat is free-to-read and super worth checking out.
Adam wrote a previous favorite of mine, Drive Thru Dreams, and this book spring-boarded off of that in a fascinating way. It covers the American relationship with work, and is both a neat work of history as well as a prescient socioeconomic look at how attitudes toward work and the principles underscoring them are evolving.
The book can bought through bookshop.org, and wherever books are sold.
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