Numlock News: January 27, 2026 • Dinosaur Footprints, Cameo, Mars

Jan 27, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Goodwill

One retailer that is doing just fine despite some feeling pinched wallets is Goodwill Industries, the largest thrift store chain in the world. It beat $7 billion in revenue in 2024 across its 3,400 stores, a seven percent increase year over year. Part of the appeal is the lower prices one gets from a secondhand shop; the other is the treasure hunt style of shopping in a store that can literally contain anything, given the six billion pounds of goods Goodwill receives as intake every year. The entire secondhand business is doing swell overall: Savers Value Village, a competitor with 300 stores, saw net sales grow 16 percent in its most recent quarter, while ThredUp reported revenue was up 34 percent last quarter.

Kim Bhasin and Sophia June, The New York Times

Cameo

Many actors have turned to the platform Cameo for a little extra cash, selling personalized videos or messages to fans. The platform saw a surge of actors join during the pandemic as work dried up in the performing arts fields, and now there are a little less than 3,000 actors on Cameo. A new analysis of 407,017 reviews for 4,777 actors on Cameo found a couple of neat trends. First up, gift-giving really is a big driver of this, as December accounts for 14 percent of all videos ordered annually. About half of the videos come in at between 30 and 90 seconds, but some go a bit longer. Nearly half are shouting out a birthday, with holiday greetings and pep talks accounting for about a quarter of the videos. When giving cameros for someone’s birthday, gifters often go for the nice, round ones. A person’s 40th birthdays were the most popular age for birthday-related recipients. People are generally pleased: 98.8 percent of reviews are five out of five.

Stephen Follows, StephenFollows.com

Malaria

Beating malaria has been a tall order, but recent accomplishments of medical science have made the disease easier to treat, even as the parasite responsible for the disease develops new strategies of survival. Two new malaria vaccines for kids — RTS,S/AS01 and R21/Matrix-M — have already prevented thousands of deaths since their introduction in 2023. Researchers are also learning new things about how malaria parasites invade cells. When it attacks a liver cell, it must briefly shed a dense surface protein, an action that makes it vulnerable to the immune system. An antibody called MAD21-101 can help block the disease from entering liver cells entirely. One worry, though, is that Plasmodium falciparum, which causes 90 percent of malaria cases, is developing sensitivity or resistance to artemisinin in 56 countries, which is central to malaria treatment worldwide.

Kwesi Akonu Adom Mensah Forson, The Conversation

Salute Your Shorts

Time spent watching short social videos is eating into what was once the most important time in anyone’s day: time spent watching television or movies. In 2022, Americans spent 10.8 hours per week watching social or creator videos and 21.2 hours per week watching television or movies. As of 2025, that’s shifted to 11 hours of social videos and 19.0 hours of watching television or movies. This is a devastating national shift; the typical American is losing the equivalent of one rewatch of Die Hard every week, and all they’re gaining from it is like a couple of minutes of clips from Game Changer episodes they’ve already seen and podcasts they don’t listen to.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Footprints

A new study describes a machine learning tool that was fed 1,974 dinosaur footprints, including not only a range of specimens across the history of dinosaurs but also modern birds. The study then identified eight features of shape variation that helped identify which dinosaur was responsible for the footprint. For context, there is a debate over whether some footprints from the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic are indeed birds, which would mean that birds existed 60 million years before their oldest known skeletons. Interestingly, this study found that those bird-like tracks were indeed more similar to modern and fossil birds than to any known dinosaur. They also made an app, DinoTracker, for researchers to use. This is personally important in my quest to identify what I hold to be a baby T. rex footprint in the concrete sidewalk outside my apartment in Queens, despite my many paleontological rivals insisting it’s “just a pigeon, dude.”

Gregor Hartmann, Tone Blakesley, Paige E. dePolo and Stephen L. Brusatte, PNAS

Museums

The latest survey of the 511 museum directors of the American Alliance of Museums points to persistent issues with attendance threatening balance sheets. A total of 50 percent of respondents reported fewer visitors than in 2019, and 29 percent reported declines in visits tied to overall weakened travel. A quarter of them said that their bottom lines are weaker than in 2019. While support from governments is down by 26 percent, the bright side is that federal funding accounts for only three percent. The real issue is that major donors are stingier, with foundation funding down 25 percent.

Dale Berning Sawa, The Art Newspaper

Mars

Earth’s “grand cycle” is a shift in the orbit of the Earth that has implications for climate. Essentially, over the course of 2.4 million years, Earth’s orbit elongates and shrinks. A new analysis simulated Earth’s orbit and found that if one removed Mars from the solar system, the grand cycle just disappears, as does another 100,000-year cycle of Earth’s eccentricity. When Mars’ simulated mass was increased, the cycles got shorter. Another eccentricity cycle, one that is 405,000 years, is governed more by Venus and Jupiter, and those remained intact.

Leah Crane, New Scientist

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