Numlock News: July 31, 2026 • Apophis, Fortitude, Endless Shrimp

Jul 31, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Fortitude

A production company is suing Netflix, alleging that Netflix compromised the sale of a World War II spy thriller starring Nicolas Cage when it lost an unencrypted master copy of Fortitude as it was stolen from Netflix’s office last month. Netflix is arguing that it doesn’t bear responsibility for the loss of the film because there was no encryption involved. The producers are suing for at least $105 million, arguing that the theft has made the film considerably harder to sell, given that they must now disclose to any potential buyer that a copy is out there in the wild. Either way, congratulations to Nicolas Cage, who is all but certain to nab the lead role in a heist movie in which he has to steal an unencrypted DCP from Netflix headquarters.

Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter

Red Lobster

The Red Lobster bankruptcy spawned litigation from creditors alleging that the company’s then-owner, the seafood seller Thai Union Group, convinced managers to launch the $20 all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion that doomed the company in a bid to sell more shrimp. The seafood supplier has long disputed those allegations related to the Ultimate Endless Shrimp boondoggle, and will now have to defend itself in court over its role in the hubristic and brash promotion. Thai Union has suggested that it is implausible that it would jeopardize its initial $575 million minority investment in Red Lobster for what would amount to $33 million in additional shrimp purchases.

Jonathan Randles and Eliza Ronalds-Hannon, Bloomberg

St. Mary’s

Over 20 years ago, the Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company was abandoned in the town of St. Mary’s in Newfoundland and Labrador. About 110 tanks, each holding 3,000 gallons of fermented fish sauce, were left behind and continued to ferment and rot over the years. This was aromatically disturbing to the town, which stank. This week, a C$1.7 million (US$1.21 million) project kicks off to remove the stockpile of rancid garum; it is to be sucked into trucks, transported to pits lined with high-density polyethylene and eventually buried.

Jim Morris, The Associated Press

Dyes

The U.S. federal government is pushing food manufacturers to remove synthetic dyes from their products, and while adoption of natural dyes has grown somewhat — sales of products with natural colors listed as an ingredient increased 24.4 percent in 2025, compared to a 0.1 percent increase for items with artificial colors — in dollar terms, growth of non-artificial dyes is remarkably slow. Products containing one of six FDA-certified colors accounted for just 7.1 percent of total food and beverage sales, and the supply of those colors increased from 11.5 million pounds in 2024 to just 12 million pounds in 2025. Reformulation is expensive and can require $50,000 to $500,000 in testing and regulatory reviews.

Sarah Zimmerman, Food Dive

Mammoths

A new study analyzed genomic data from 521 woolly mammoths to determine their genetic sex, and found stark differences between mammoth remains found in dispersed natural settings and those found at accumulation sites, which result from human predation of herds. The mammoth remains found in the wild were 66 percent male and 34 percent female, which aligns with the idea that solitary males were more likely to die in natural traps like sinkholes. At accumulation sites, the mammoths were 70 percent female and 30 percent male.

Karin Tjulin, Stockholm University

Nepotism

Allegations of nepotism get thrown around the music industry a lot these days, but increasingly that’s less because someone has a musical lineage and more just because they come from money. A new analysis looked at every person who made the Billboard Hot 100 year-end list from 1960 to 2025, looking simply to see if each artist (or, in the case of a band, their frontman) had a parent who also had a Wikipedia page. After excluding parents who had a Wikipedia page exclusively because they sired a musician, the data indicates that even at their peak (in the 1990s, at 7.2 percent of artists) nepo babies never made up a particularly high percentage of musicians, and the 2.6 percent of the 2020s is a historical low.

Chris Dalla Riva, Can’t Get Much Higher

Apophis

On April 13, 2029, the 340-meter-diameter asteroid Apophis will pass within 32,000 kilometers of Earth, closer even than the altitude of geostationary satellites. Since the initial workshop about the encounter in 2020, three major missions are preparing to intercept Apophis and conduct science in its vicinity, including the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s DESTINY+ mission, which will be the first to survey the rock on its way to another asteroid, Phaethon. After that is a European Space Agency mission called Ramses that will ride the same rocket as DESTINY+ and essentially replicate the Hera mission that is due to arrive at the asteroid Didymos this year. Lastly, after the asteroid moves on from Earth, the OSIRIS-APEX mission from NASA will study it for 18 months following June 5, 2029.

Andrew Jones, Scientific American

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Fola Akinnibi over at Bloomberg who wrote New York, City of Scaffolding, Tries a Glow-up. Fola and I spoke about how these sidewalk sheds first started to darken our doorstep, why some of them last for decades, and how the city wants to change that. Akinnibi can be found at Bloomberg, on Twitter @FolaAk and on BlueSky.

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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; send 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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