Numlock News: January 29, 2025 • Van Gogh, Antarctica, Fortnite

Jan 29, 2025

Heist

A team of thieves blew open a side door of the Drents Museum in the Netherlands and stole three golden armbands and the golden helmet of Cotofenesti, treasures on loan from Romania that come from the lost Dacian civilization, which dates to 450 BC. These were on loan as part of a collection of 670 pieces, and have had political repercussions as the Romanians consider the stolen objects to be crucial cultural artifacts. The fear is that the items — valued at €6 million — may have been stolen because they’re made out of about €80,000 worth of gold, a bullion value which would be a devastating end for the treasures and which has kicked off a €100,000 bounty for the cache.

Senay Boztas, The Art Newspaper

Expressions

A new study found that people who were facially expressive were more liked by social partners, which may be one reason why people produce on average 101 facial movements per minute during a given social interaction. The study looked at 52 people in an online social interaction with another participant who, get this, was actually a researcher pretending to be another subject who then created lots of challenging social scenarios like telling bad jokes or demanding a high percentage of a reward in a negotiation, stirring social conflict and embarrassment in an attempt to goad reactions. Those videos were in turn evaluated by 176 other participants, who found that the more expressive were more liked.

Eithne Kavanagh, Jamie Whitehouse and Bridget Waller, Scientific American

Van Gogh

A canvas bought at a Minnesota garage sale for under $50 has been taken on as an investment opportunity by an art research firm that’s poured $30,000 into trying to get it verified as a real Vincent van Gogh painting, specifically one that they think is worth over $15 million. The painting is of a fisherman and the name “Elimar” is in the lower righthand corner in paint. This process does have to be bootstrapped; the Van Gogh Museum used to get around 200 authentication requests a year, most of which are bogus, and now gets up to 500 a year, so they basically tell would-be Van Gogh owners to screw off until they can get some actual art professionals to back their claim. The Elimar signature, the firm contends, is not a dealbreaker as lots of Van Gogh’s works lack his signature, and the discovery of the pigment PR-50 — generally thought to be patented in 1905-06 in France — doesn’t preclude the work from being a Van Gogh (he died in 1890) because France is bad at patents, as they found another patent from 1883.

Kelly Crow, The Wall Street Journal

Islands

Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite, announced the state of its creator business, where the now 70,000 users who designed some 200,000 unique in-game islands for players can get paid for their efforts depending on how they’re used. This means that some 60,000 creator-made islands are played each day, and some of them are making a real killing on the hobby. According to Epic, 12,909 creators cleared over $100 in payouts from their work in 2024, while 418 managed to make over $100,000, 37 cleared $1 million, and seven creators managed to make over $10 million from their work. While Epic paid out $350 million to creators last year, it’s getting its money’s worth: Players spent 5.23 billion hours playing on creator-made islands, 36.5 percent of total Fortnite playtime.

Julia Alexander, Posting Nexus

Antarctica

The frozen continent of Antarctica does have some unique ecosystems on the rare bits of land that are permanently ice-free, land that covers just 0.5 percent of the continent and has been under threat from human activity. A new study published in Scientific Data has finally mapped and classified these ice-free lands, breaking them down into nine different Major Environment Units, 33 Habitat Complexes, and 269 Bioregional Ecosystem Types. There’s a surprising amount of biodiversity on these rocky, often coastal stretches, including microforests of lichens and mosses, two flowering plants — Antarctic hairgrass and pearlwort — as well as mites, springtails, tardigrades, nematodes and more.

Samantha Dunn, University of New South Wales

Digital Lending

According to OverDrive, digital borrowing of e-books and audiobooks from libraries was way up in 2024, with 739 million checkouts at libraries and schools that use OverDrive’s Libby and Sora apps, including 366.2 million e-books (up 7 percent), 278.3 million audiobook checkouts (up a whipping 19 percent), and 44.8 million checkouts of comics (up 20 percent). Growth was fastest at public libraries, which accounted for 706.3 million checkouts, and 192 library systems reached north of a million digital checkouts.

Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly

Baltics

There are nine countries with shorelines on the Baltic Sea, and eight of them are having an increasingly complex and frosty relationship with one of them: specifically, Russia. Undersea pipelines and power and communications cables cross the sea, and gosh darn it, wouldn’t you know it but at least 11 cables have been damaged in the past 15 months, most if not all of which are suspected by NATO and the affected countries to be the result of sabotage. Just this past Sunday, a fiber-optic cable connecting Latvia with the Swedish island Gotland was damaged, and authorities have seized Russian ships that dragged their anchors over the course of hundreds of kilometers, severing cables.

John Leicester and Emma Burrows, The Associated Press

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