Numlock News: July 29, 2026 • Allulose, Betelgeuse, Jaguar

Jul 29, 2026

By Walt Hickey

FIFA

FIFA has, over the course of its history, been the Manhattan Project of corruption, pushing the boundaries of what is possible and weaponizing what grifters from just a generation earlier considered only theoretical. That legacy may very well continue as FIFA announced that it is looking to create a new entity: FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), within which the global soccer governing body would place the revenue-generating enterprises like media rights, ticket sales and sponsorships. FIFA would then sell a 21 percent stake of that company at a $20 billion valuation, which would lead to $4.2 billion in cash flowing immediately and directly into FIFA coffers and then presumably immediately and indirectly to god only knows where.

Eben Novy-Williams, Sportico

Unpublished

The billion-dollar AI labs are being remarkably stingy at participating in the scientific publication process that made their entire industry possible, a new study has found. After identifying 317 AI companies that existed from 1998 to 2025 valued at over $1 billion each, those top-flight AI unicorn companies accounted for just one in every 1,000 AI papers published in 2025. Over half of the startups never produced a single qualifying paper out of 1,389 peer-reviewed publications and 688 preprints, and only 24 firms — 7.6 percent — produced any highly-cited papers.

Celina Zhao, Science

Sugar

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a proposed class-action lawsuit over the sugar content of Chobani yogurt may proceed. The company advertised some of its yogurt as sugar-free, but the suit alleges that Chobani Zero Sugar yogurt actually contained four grams of allulose, a naturally occurring sweetener that the litigants contend is a sugar. Chobani argues that FDA regulation listed just glucose, fructose, lactose and sucrose as sugars, while the more expansive definition might include all monosaccharides.

Jonathan Stempel, Insurance Journal

Trek

A jaguar named Gaspar has smashed the record for dispersal of a tagged jaguar, traveling 2,122 kilometers from the time his tracking collar was fitted in November 2024 to when the collar stopped transmitting locations a year later. By comparison, the previous record for a tagged jag was 60 to 100 kilometers.

Joshua Rapp Learn, New Scientist

Streams

According to data from Nielsen, streaming television rose to 48.6 percent of total television watch time in May, up from 44.8 percent in May of last year. YouTube achieved a platform-best 13.8 percent of total watch time, up from 10.4 percent in May 2025. Thanks to the success of The Boys and a number of NBA and WNBA games, Amazon’s Prime Video saw a 25 percent year-over-year increase, good for 4.5 percent of total watch time in the month.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Rathlin

Rats can wipe out fragile bird populations on islands, and as a result, nearly 1,000 islands have attempted some form of invasive rodent eradication effort. These can be successful, but it’s especially challenging to kill invasive populations of vermin when there’s permanent human settlement on an island — as was the case for Rathlin Island, a 14-square-kilometer island that is home to Northern Ireland’s largest seabird colony, but also hosts invasive ferrets and rats that killed those birds. An initial effort to wipe out the ferrets required 450 traps set around the island, and as of March, the requisite two years have passed for the island to be certified ferret-free. The rats were a much bigger problem, as while there were just 98 ferrets, there were an estimated 10,000 rats. Thus began a massive effort involving 7,000 bait stations placed at 50-meter intervals all over Rathlin starting in September 2024. As far as people know, the last rat was killed in June 2025; if all proceeds as hoped, Rathlin might be declared rat-free next June.

Clare Wilson, New Scientist

Lydia?

Betelgeuse is the massive red supergiant that may be seen in the shoulder of the constellation Orion, and it’s long beguiled astronomers. Lately, that interest has come from the cyclical brightening and darkening of the star, which has spawned speculation that there might be a smaller companion star and that the red supergiant is indeed in a binary system. A paper published in February led to the announcement that Hubble observations indicated there was a possible second star passing in front of Betelgeuse once every six years, and new data from the SPHERE/ZIMPOL instrument of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope now appears to confirm it with a study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The second star, now termed Betelgeuse B, was spotted in data from December 2024, when the companion star would be at maximum separation from the known star.

Adam Kovac, Scientific American

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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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