Numlock News: July 7, 2026 • Hannibal, Mammoths, Love Island

Jul 07, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Just a quick thank you and a heads up to the very earliest backers of Numlock. We launched the paid Sunday edition around 8 years ago this week, so a solid fraction of you with annual subscriptions will be renewing this week. Thank you for your support, you make this whole thing possible.

Fossils

A new analysis from the International Energy Agency found that fossil fuels continue to accrue substantial subsidies from governments that otherwise mouth along to their green transitions. Overall, a third of government energy spending — $939 billion — goes towards energy affordability, primarily benefitting oil, gas and domestic coal, as well as electrical bills overall. In 2025, fully 68 percent of all money spent on the fossil fuel system came from taxpayers when accounting for public investment and public subsidies, up from 59 percent in 2015.

David Fickling, Bloomberg

Kamo’oalewa

A Chinese spacecraft has, after a 400-day, 621-million-mile journey, arrived at Kamo’oalewa, which is one of Earth’s quasi-moons, and possibly even a chunk of our own moon that was thrown into space by an impact. The rock is 66 feet in length, rotates on its axis every 28 minutes and technically orbits the Sun but hangs close to Earth — between nine million and 25 million miles from the planet. The spacecraft, Tianwen-2, reached within 12 miles of it in late June.

Claire Cameron, Scientific American

Love Island

Love Island USA is a streaming hit, racking up 824 million minutes viewed in its first three episodes, and hooking fans fast, with 80 percent of viewers who started the show within its first two days going on to watch at least 15 episodes. The pace is fascinating, with a new episode dropping six days out of every week, episodes which are quickly chopped up and spread across socials as people discuss the new permutations of the polycule.

Melos Ambaye, Bloomberg

I Cannae Imagine The Effort

A new analysis supports the theory that Col de la Traversette was the likeliest route through which the Carthaginian general Hannibal crossed the Alps and into Italy to wage war on the Romans. It is a theory now backed up by the calculation that the Col de la Traversette would have been the most energy-efficient route for Hannibal’s host of 40,000 men, 7,000 horses and 37 war elephants, requiring 5.42 terajoules. The second-easiest route, the 6.02 terajoule Col de Montgenèvre, would have required 11 percent more energy, with Col du Clapier (6.28 TJ, 16 percent more energy) and Col du Mont Cenis (6.45 TJ, 19 percent more energy) posing significantly higher efforts. Traversette would not have been a simple ambula in horto, either, with men losing an estimated 19 percent of their body fat and the elephants losing four percent.

University of Oxford

Sell By

California has banned “sell by” dates in most food items, owing to the fact that there is no actual meaning of the phrase legally speaking, and that ambitious sell-by dates are considered to be a contributing cause of food waste. Manufacturers must now use either “best if used by” labels to describe peak quality or “use by” labels for product safety, disambiguating a term that has generally been in the eye — and the intestinal fortitude — of the beholder. The only product regulated at the federal level with a date label is infant formula, with a 2022 study from the University of Maryland finding over 50 different date labels on packaged food sold in stores. The “sell by” stamp is, according to the FDA, responsible for 20 percent of the nation’s food waste, which in California would mean six million tons of unexpired food sent to the dump annually.

Olga R. Rodriguez, Associated Press

Mammoth

A new study analyzed the diets of people in Canada’s Eastern Beringia from 13,300 to 14,000 years ago, the diets of the Clovis people of North America from 12,800 to 13,400 years ago and the Fishtail projectile point people of South America from 11,600 to 12,900 years ago. It found a consistent source of protein: large mammals such as mammoths, giant ground sloths and large camels. According to the study, at least 98 percent of the diet of the Early Paleondians came from those large mammals. This differs from other research on the same data, which holds that early Americans were dietary generalists rather than megafauna munchers.

Chris Baldwin, University of Wyoming

Antarctica

Antarctica froze over before the Arctic did, and the reason why has been a bit of a mystery. Antarctica became covered in ice 34 million years ago, while the Arctic held out for a bit and stayed ice-free for another 25 million years. If CO2 falling was the sole reason the poles formed, they would have formed around the same time, but a new study presents a compelling theory as to why the southern pole froze first. The research points to the slow-moving geological forces that produced Antarctica’s mountains, peaks that were formed from mantle waves that created an escarpment two kilometers high, which produced the kind of elevation that can sustain the production and accumulation of ice.

Thomas Gernon, The Conversation

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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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