Numlock News: July 28, 2026 • Smilodon, Empress, Cosmic Lighthouse

Jul 28, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Emmys

The Emmy Awards are actually controlled by two separate organizations that have, for decades, been embroiled in an at-times acrimonious East Coast/West Coast feud. The Primetime Emmys are overseen by the Los Angeles-based Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, or the TV Academy, while the New York-based National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, or NATAS, oversees the Daytime Emmys, Sports Emmys, Children’s & Family Emmys, the News & Documentary Emmys, International Emmys and regional Emmys. ATAS, which has managed to get its show on an actual telecast, is the more well-heeled organization, with revenues over $53.5 million last fiscal year, compared to the $9.8 million in revenue for NATAS. Lately, things have been on the calmer side, so the waters are once again being tested for a possible reunification.

Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter

Casting

China’s microdramas are full of AI, with 95 percent of the 128,000 microdramas released in the first quarter of the year relying on the technology in some capacity. This has already led to some issues, with roughly 700 AI-related face theft cases over the past three years hitting Guangzhou’s Internet Court. To handle the demand for AI assets in a way that keeps things out of the courts, online platforms are paying people to license their likeness for AI-generated video content. ActID, one such company, has 300 clients licensing their images to AI production, with two AI drama productions licensing those faces so far and paying 99 to 500 yuan ($15 to $74) per episode.

Kinling Lo and Viola Zhou, Rest of World

Smilodon

Saber-tooth tigers, or Smilodon fatalis, went extinct about 12,000 years ago, though many specimens have been trapped in tar pits, which facilitates interesting research across hundreds of samples. Researchers analyzed 3,722 vertebrae from 849 adults and found lots of congenital deformities, including 48 fused vertebrae, 32 incompletely developed vertebral arches and three spinal nerve tumors. That last one is interesting; that would imply that among the Smilodon found in La Brea’s tar pits, 353 per 100,000 had the tumors, which are ordinarily remarkably rare. By comparison, that number is less than one in 100,000 for humans. What this indicates is that, as the population hit a bottleneck from which it never recovered, there were lengthy years of inbreeding among the population that led to the malformations.

Taylor Mitchell Brown, Science

Influential

Historically, brands that cut deals with social media influencers would aim high and work their way down the food chain, but the development of “advocacy programs” is enabling companies to find legions of people with relatively small followings who are one $10 gift card away from shilling their wares. According to Emarketer, influencers with fewer than 20,000 followers accounted for 19.5 percent of the total influencer marketing spend in 2021, a figure that is up to 45 percent of campaign spend as of 2026.

Katie Deighton, The Wall Street Journal

Imperial

A new poll from Nikkei and TV Tokyo found that 84 percent of Japanese respondents approved of allowing female emperors. The issue has come up, as there are just a few eligible men remaining in the line of succession, and for years, advocates of modernization have proposed either allowing women to inherit the Chrysanthemum Throne or at least allowing a son to inherit the title of emperor through their mother, currently not allowed. All told, 25 percent supported female emperors but not female-lineage emperors, 59 percent supported both female emperors and female-lineage emperors, and just eight percent opposed both. This comes after a revision to Imperial House Law that allows male-lineage male descendants from former imperial branch families to be adopted into the imperial family, a move that itself was supported by just 42 percent of respondents.

Nikkei Asia

Lighthouses

A new paper argues that while lots of signal-hunting for alien civilizations has focused on seeking out femtosecond lasers in high-energy bursts, perhaps it makes more sense to look for pulsing interstellar beacons instead. As it stands, our current astronomical surveys would not pick this up; any such beacon broadcasting at less than a nanosecond burst of light would not be seen by any SETI survey, except the PANOSETI project, which would be too low-resolution to capture such a “cosmic lighthouse.” The proposed project to search the local stellar neighborhood for such a beacon would involve a qCMOS detector, GPUs and diffractive-refractive lenses, with a one-meter telescope capable of detecting a 100 MW laser with a 10-microsecond pulse within 20 parsecs.

Andy Tomaswick, Universe Today

Photobiology

While chlorophyll understandably gets a lot of the attention, there are, in fact, many photosensitive proteins that science has become very interested in as of late, particularly as it relates to how animals register the length of day and when they ought to embark on important life events like migration. Opsins are photosensitive proteins that respond instantly to sunlight, and as of about 25 years ago, scientists thought they only contributed to sight. But beyond vision, opsins also govern lots of different behaviors ranging from body temperature to growth. While light-sensitive cells in the retina have understandably attracted most of the scientific attention, three other light-reactive proteins (melanopsin, encephalopsin and neuropsin, found in the retina, brain, skin, immune system and blood vessels) have recently become of significant interest.

Emily Laber-Warren, Knowable Magazine

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; SEN corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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