Numlock News: January 29, 2026 • Cognac, Cambrian, Comics

Jan 29, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Diamond

Last year, the longtime intermediary in the American comics business — the single firm that connects all the myriad producers of comic books, from the Big Two to the smallest indie, to the legion of independent comic book stores that dot the country — filed for bankruptcy. Diamond Comic Distributors’ insolvency has caused reverberating problems across the industry, even well after its affairs were settled and its Chapter 11 became a Chapter 7. One big issue is the inventory: Diamond basically kept all the industry’s books in its warehouses on consignment for publishers big and small. When the distributor went under, that inventory became an asset that creditors had a claim on. It’s a whole lot of comics, $47,395,014 at book value according to a January 27 filing, worth some $113,737,037 at retail. What happens to that consignment inventory is a matter for the courts.

Milton Griepp, ICv2

Fossil

A site in China has produced a record of a remarkable ecosystem, with the 512-million-year-old fossil site dating to the Cambrian period. Found in a quarry in Hunan Province in 2021, scientists report that they have analyzed 8,681 fossils from 153 species at the site, of which 60 percent are new to science. It features 16 major groups of animals, many of which are soft-bodied.

James Woodford, New Scientist

Earth Too

A new planet called HD 137010 b, described in a paper published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, is exciting because of how much it resembles Earth. It’s got an orbit that is 355 days long, is about the size of our world and it’s got a bright star. The planet is 146 light-years away and was spotted by NASA’s Kepler space telescope in 2017. The star is a K-dwarf, and while the planet orbits at about the same distance as Earth, the star is 1000 degrees Celsius cooler than the sun. As a result, HD 137010 b probably gets less energy from its star than Mars gets from ours.

Elise Cutts, Science

Bingo

Nielsen data is in, and the biggest streaming show of 2025 was Bluey, which saw 45.2 billion minutes of viewing on Disney+, its second consecutive year at No. 1 on Nielsen’s chart. The second biggest show, Grey’s Anatomy, racked up 40.92 billion minutes across its 450-episode library, and Stranger Things was the third-biggest show with 39.95 billion minutes. Overall, U.S. viewers watched 16.7 trillion minutes of programming on streaming platforms in 2025, up 19 percent over 2024, the equivalent of 31.7 million years of linear time.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Cognac

The Cognac industry — based in Cognac, where they produce Cognac — is ripping up vines in its first coordinated removal effort since the 1990s as the industry deals with a downturn in demand. While we can’t call it a Bear Market (per European Union rules, it’s only considered one if the downturn originated in the Bear region of France), it’s not looking great: shipments fell to 141 million bottles, the lowest level since 2009, and consumption is projected to drop two percent annually through 2029. China’s brandy imports fell by 40 percent to 22 million liters in 2024 following a trade fight between the EU and China, which is not helping, and the trade group of producers is aiming to shrink acreage under cultivation by 13 percent.

Angelina Rascouet, Bloomberg

The Front Fell Off

Last month, Japan’s H3 rocket failed during launch, but did so in an exciting and interesting new way: the front fell off. The H3 rocket has had six successful launches across eight flights, and the pair of failures came during the first launch and this December launch. An analysis of the mission data found that the Michibiki 5 satellite, moored on the top of the rocket, was dislodged about a minute after the rocket released its payload shroud in the upper atmosphere. A rear-facing camera captured the ill-fated satellite as it broke off the rocket, which proceeded to continue upwards into a low-altitude orbit even as the satellite hurtled downwards. The second stage engine had lost 20 percent of its thrust, but because the front — a five-ton navigation satellite — had indeed fallen off, the rocket still managed to get into orbit, albeit an unsustainable one. Rocket science is obviously a rather difficult field of engineering, but ultimately, rockets are generally designed so the front does not fall off; it is nevertheless remarkable that orbit was still achieved despite the whoopsie-daisy.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Smellscapes

Historians and scientists attempting to document and recreate historical smells are using sophisticated sampling techniques as well as cutting-edge tech to identify and preserve aromas. One project, Odeuropa, developed a database of 2.5 million historical smell references, pulled from 43,000 images and 167,000 historical texts across seven European languages to help develop an understanding of odors over the ages. Other scientists catalog artifacts, historical sites and even mummies based on scent; the latter tend to smell woody, spicy and sweet according to one panel of scientists, owing to the chemicals used in preservation.

Kaja Šeruga, Knowable Magazine

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