Numlock News: January 23, 2026 • Gladiators, Space Debris, Crown-of-Thorns Starfish
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
By My Stars And Guarders
The crown-of-thorns starfish is native to the Indo-Pacific region, but depressed predator populations and high reproductive ability mean they’re growing out of control. A single female crown-of-thorns starfish can release 200 million eggs per year, and an adult consumes enough coral annually to strip a 10-square-meter region of coral reef bare. Given that there are millions of them, it’s hard to kill the starfish one by one, as divers have had to do in the past. When Okinawa’s reefs were assailed by crown-of-thorns starfish 40 years ago, teams of divers had to remove 1.5 million by hand to save the reef from being overwhelmed. Lab trials have found a new strategy to make it easier to keep the species at bay: a synthetic pheromone named “Acanthaster attractins.” The pheromone attracts hordes of crown-of-thorns starfish in lab trials, and is on the path to field trials to see if it can help catch the starfish in large quantities.
Oscars
Sinners got a new record 16 nominations at the Oscars, followed up by One Battle After Another with 13 noms. The previous record was 14 nominations in a single year. As expected, the Oscars music branch saw fit to once again nominate Diane Warren for her 17th nomination, as the songwriter extends her streak of Oscar nominations sans a win. The song, “Dear Me,” was written by Diane Warren and performed by Kesha and was featured in the documentary Diane Warren: Relentless, which is about the songwriter Diane Warren.
The Associated Press and Melinda Newman, Billboard
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Gladiators
New tech has allowed archaeologists to better identify graffiti in Pompeii, and a new batch of uncovered illustrations from a passageway first excavated in 1794 reveals new insights into the social lives of Pompeians. Specifically, that they were into gladiators and, to borrow a Latin phrase, in flagrante delicto. Previously, about 200 inscriptions had been found on the 27 meters of wall, but the new analysis turned up another 79 carvings into the plaster, including a neat drawing of two gladiators fighting. There was also another drawing boasting the nearby feats of a person in the trade of negotiable affection named Tychè.
Climate
Americans are concerned about climate change, but are reasonably assured that climate change is going to be something that happens to some other guy who isn’t them. A new survey found that 65 percent of respondents said climate change will do a large or moderate amount of harm to the world, 60 percent said it would do moderate or large harm to the United States, 51 percent said the same about their local community and just 29 percent think that climate change would do a large or moderate amount of harm to them personally in the next several decades. Similar polling has been found in other electoral constituencies such as Omelas or small towns featured in The New Yorker articles.
Color
An analysis of the cover art of 752 singles that topped the Billboard Hot 100 from 1960 to 2025 found that while the color black on covers has risen steadily — rising from 9.9 percent of the color used on singles in the 1960s to 17.2 percent in the 2020s — the art on singles still tends to be vibrant. This bucks trends seen in other fields, such as vehicle colors and photographs in museums, where vibrant colors have gone out of style in favor of whites, blacks and grays. There are some shifts, though; the percentage of single covers featuring the face of the performing artist has declined from 83 percent in the 1970s to just 63 percent since 2010, and I blame Daft Punk.
Chris Dalla Riva, Can’t Get Much Higher
Sonic Booms
A clever new study was able to track space debris crashing down to Earth by monitoring already existing networks of seismographs that pick up debris’s sonic boom. The study specifically looked at the reentry of the 1.5 metric ton Shenzhou-15 module that crashed to Earth in April 2024. The observed reentry was 25 minutes earlier than the Tracking and Impact Prediction issued by the U.S. Space Track service, and 8,600 kilometers away from the service’s predicted reentry. Notably, though, seismic signals were detected at 124 stations of the Southern California Seismic Network and one station of the Nevada Seismic Network. When plotted out, the researchers were able to reconstruct the Mach cone’s intersection with the ground. Stations east of the 117th meridian didn’t record a sonic boom, indicating that the object was either subsonic, burned up or hit the ground somewhere thereabouts.
Benjamin Fernando and Constantinos Charalambous, Science and Lee Billings, Scientific American
Texas
A public records request reveals that the University of Texas’s athletic department spent $375.9 million in operating expenses in 2025, up $50 million over the previous year. Of that, $94 million went to facilities debt, $53 million to pay coaches, $50.3 million for support staff and admin, $15 million on travel and $35 million on marketing and fundraising. Broken down by sport, the University’s athletic department spent $74 million on football, going 13-3 and making the CFP semifinals. UT made $352.5 million in revenues. In general, Texas tends to be up against Ohio State, Michigan and Alabama when it comes to vying for the title of biggest-spending school on athletics, though those schools have not yet released their financials.
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“Trade of negotiable affection”
Quite a euphemism.