Numlock News: January 6, 2026 • Smart Rings, Solar Storm, Pizza
By Walt Hickey
Sliced
Pizza chains in the United States generated $31 billion in sales in 2024, when one in every 10 Americans ate a slice each day. That said, pizza’s dominance is now threatened, as the number of pizza restaurants peaked in 2019 and has been in decline since. Pizza in general has ceded ground to other cuisines in the United States, dropping from the second-most popular cuisine in the 1990s to the sixth in 2024. It had since been outnumbered by coffee shops and Mexican restaurants, among others.
Heather Haddon, The Wall Street Journal
Staring At The Sun
In May 2024, Earth was hit by some of the most significant geomagnetic storms in decades thanks to a surfeit of solar flares. The active region of the sun responsible for the cascade of ions was termed NOAA 13664, and on Monday, researchers revealed that they observed the region for 94 consecutive days. That is the longest-ever observation of an active region of the sun, producing the longest-ever continuous set of images for a single active region. The region originated on the far side of the sun on April 16, 2024, and then rotated out of sight on July 18, 2024.
Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Scientific American
Video Games
There’s a frenzy to greenlight adaptations of video games in Hollywood after decades of assuming such source material was not ideal for producing lucrative art. There were 272 titles greenlit from 2019 to 2025 that were based on video games, which peaked in 2024 with 62 new commissions. In the second half of 2025, 18 game adaptations were commissioned, of which 78 percent would be live action, according to the report from Ampere. The colossal success of both The Super Mario Bros. Movie as well as A Minecraft Movie, not to mention a solid run of Sonic: The Hedgehog movies, broke the looking streak for game-based titles, which ranged from infamous flops (Super Mario Bros., 1993) to mere trash (like 2005’s Doom or 2010’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time).
Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News
Earthquakes
A new study has directly linked seismic activity along the vents in the waters off Antarctica to the blooms of phytoplankton surviving in that difficult environment. Early studies indicated that deep-sea vents probably had something to do with algae blooms. After all, they pump iron into the water, and that’s a key limiting ingredient for phytoplankton growth. This new study looked at earthquake records and satellite imagery from 1997 to 2024, as well as deep-sea chemical sampling data, to find that the blooms grew the largest when magnitude 5 or greater earthquakes occurred in the weeks or months prior to the growing season. Seismic activity pushing volcanic iron pushed into the ocean in larger quantities was indeed helpful. This is especially neat because “deep sea vents proving instrumental in the growth of microorganisms” is a pretty important chunk of the “how did life on Earth emerge?” question.
Taylor Mitchell Brown, Science
Major
A new survey asked Americans which college majors they considered to be good decisions at this point in time. Nursing and engineering tied at the top of the pack with 88 percent of respondents considering it at least a somewhat good choice. These were followed by computer science, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering (each about 84 percent), and business (at 82 percent). This is, of course, vastly different from the subjects that respondents think are actually interesting to study. For that, history came out on top (74 percent at least somewhat interesting), followed by psychology (73 percent) and criminal justice (71 percent). I, for one, chalk this up to the fact that police procedurals are the single most popular form of scripted television entertainment in America. If money were no matter, the career choice of a typical business major or engineer would just be becoming Detective Munch on Law & Order.
Oura
Smart rings are having a moment, on track to see a 49 percent increase in shipments for 2025. For perspective, smartwatches grew by just six percent over the same period. The rings monitor sleep and activity and can typically be linked to other health monitoring apps. Smartwatches are clearly the bigger market right now (an estimated 163.5 million of those shipped last year compared to 4.3 million smart rings). However, the rings have been catching on, in no small part because their battery life is considerably better than that of watches. The appeal of the smart jewelry is timeless; these are powerful all-seeing rings that can track your movements, provide constant reminders of how little the wearer has rested, are water resistant, fashionable, bound to its owner and enviably stylish. And apparently, the new ceramic versions won’t even melt in the fires of Mount Doom like the prototype did.
Friends Don’t Lie
Preliminary data from Samba TV is in, with the series finale of Stranger Things watched by an estimated 3.7 million U.S. households in the four days since its debut on New Year’s Eve. The final season was released in three batches. The first four episodes came out on November 26 and were seen by 3.2 million households in their first four days. The second batch of three episodes was released on Christmas and racked up 3.4 million households of viewers. Netflix’s foray into cinemas was also a hit, with AMC reporting that 753,000 moviegoers came to watch the finale in its theaters on New Year’s Eve and Day.
Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News
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I love pizza. Of all the things I served in my years waiting tables, it’s the only thing I never got sick of eating. That said, pizza these days is so expensive. I know, everything is, but when you take a food that is “supposed to be” affordable and make it not so much, it’s difficult to justify.
This history buff (B.A. and M.A.) bemoans the lack of tv shows about intrepid history professors solving the world's problems...........