Numlock News: July 30, 2026 • Aquiry, Ivory, Eurydice

Jul 30, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Diamonds

De Beers could sell for $1 billion, a steep decline for the diamond monopoly once valued at $18 billion. As it stands, the leading bid for the Anglo American subsidiary is from Global Diamond Consortium, which is a group that includes the governments of Namibia and Angola, which would pay $750 million upfront and then $250 million later. The transaction would be subject to negotiations with Botswana, which owns 15 percent of De Beers, and also has a 50 percent interest in the joint Debswana, which produces most of the diamonds that come from Botswana. The carrying value of De Beers was down to $2.3 billion as recently as February.

Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.com

Greek Myth Movie

While The Odyssey dominated the box office this past weekend, the live capture of the Broadway hit Hadestown was released in cinemas as Hadestown: The Musical, and made $10.2 million domestically across a little under 2,000 screens. Though overshadowed by the other mythological movie about an Achaean legend, that is good for the best-ever opening for a Broadway live capture at the box office, edging out the $10.1 million made by Hamilton, which topped out at $16.2 million domestically.

Brian Welk, IndieWire

Limited Edition Minis

Excavations at the Hohle Fels Cave in southwest Germany have uncovered a magnificent find: two 40,000-year-old carved birds made out of mammoth ivory. Their dimensions are tiny, at 2 x 1 x 0.5 cm, and are the smallest discovered so far, containing rich detail. They are of similar age, were discovered 1.5 meters from each other and may have even been carved by the same person. One figure is complete and appears to depict a brooding bird, but the other appears to be unfinished and has an outstretched wing. While exciting for archaeology, the find has presumably sent the miniature painting, modeling and tabletop wargaming communities into a tizzy — drastically pushing back the history of their hobby, cementing the recreational act of making little guys as a cornerstone of the human creative experience and presumably launching intense internecine arguments as to the species of the birds in question and whether the specific size of these ice age models indicates a fundamental human predisposition to either the 1:32 (one gauge) or 1:22.5 (“G scale”) scale.

Janna Eberhardt, University of Tübingen

Landslide

A new database developed by researchers at the University of Washington maps landslide risk across the entire United States and rates 128 million buildings based on landslide susceptibility. According to the analysis, 6.5 million people live in a landslide-prone region; the regions of Appalachia and the West Coast are at the most significant risk, containing about 80 percent of the people vulnerable to landslides. About 20 percent of the land in the United States is prone to landslides, though just two percent of the population live in them.

William Poor, University of Washington

Link

On July 3, the Link mission was launched into orbit, intending to send a satellite to NASA’s Swift gamma-ray telescope, which can push the instrument into a higher orbit to avoid a fiery re-entry and ensure an extended life for the spacecraft. It’s a rescue mission that has the dual purposes of prolonging the service of a satellite that lacks a propulsion system, while also serving as a proof-of-concept mission and tech demonstration for the commercial satellite servicing industry, a high-risk but high-reward mission. That risk, evidently, is real; the Link satellite has experienced issues with altitude control and an investigation has attributed the problem to two of the satellite’s three reaction wheels not operating as intended. Regardless of the outcome, NASA is already pleased with the results.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Aquiry

Researchers flew a plane equipped with lidar imaging equipment over 4,497 square kilometers of Brazil’s Southwest Amazon, and detected 396 new earthworks in the region, indicating that the area as a whole might contain as many as 24,000 to 30,000 in total. The geoglyphs spotted are a signature of the Aquiry civilization that existed there between 600 BCE and 850 CE. Based on this data, the researchers estimate that at the civilization’s apparent peak around 100 to 300 CE, there were potentially three million people living there, in an area about 183,000 square kilometers.

Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Scientific American and Julia Vaz, Science

Phones

For the first time on record, more Americans support a ban on students using cellphones during the entire school day than oppose it, with 48 percent of respondents backing a ban and just 43 percent opposing one, down from 53 percent opposed and 36 percent in favor as of 2024. Support for a ban on middle and high school students using cellphones during just class is considerably higher, at 77 percent in favor and 18 percent opposed.

Jeffrey Gottfried, Pew Research Center

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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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