Numlock News: July 8, 2026 • Forgeries, Galaxy Clusters, Maglev

Jul 08, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Due Diligence

A man who attempted to sell three stone Cycladic figures and an Anatolian stargazer statuette through Sotheby’s has been sentenced to two years in prison after admitting that they were forgeries. He claimed that he had inherited the items from a grandfather, and forged provenance documents to that effect. If authentic, the figures would have dated back about 3,000 years; evidence collected by the police suggested that they were “not ancient.” The judge eventually settled on a potential value of $340,000 had Sotheby’s due diligence failed to crack the case. The conviction specifically relates to the forgeries of the provenance documents and doesn’t make any conclusions about the items. The fact that the documents were fakes is pretty open-and-shut: invoices dated to 1976 involved a typeface that was not developed until 2001.

Riah Pryor, The Art Newspaper

Gloves

The pandemic exposed a gap in American manufacturing of nitrile gloves, a crucial medical protective gear that has simply no domestic production capacity. The government saw this problem and plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into shoring up domestic production capacity, an effort that appears to have failed as the American glove startups were unable to compete with the international offerings, which mostly come from Malaysia. One issue is that medical-grade nitrile butadiene rubber is not produced anywhere in the United States; interestingly, the price for butadiene has spiked in the past year, from 39.5 cents per pound last June to 63.5 cents per pound as of June 2026 thanks to the war with Iran, a conflict that imperiled the supply chains for lots of petrochemicals and their byproducts.

Anna Edney, Bloomberg

VAR

The number of red cards issued at this World Cup is up substantially, with 13 red cards issued in this year’s tournament compared to just four red cards in both the 2018 and 2022 contests. Yellow cards have been slightly down, with 2.52 yellows per match compared to 3.5 in 2022 and 3.2 in 2018. The spike in serious infractions appears to stem from a number of shifts in how the violations are assessed; for starters, two of the 13 red cards this year went to players who violated the rule that they cannot cover their mouths when talking to their opponents. But three of those red cards were actually upgraded from yellow cards following the review of VAR footage, which allowed referees to, upon review, assess a steeper penalty.

Casareo Contreras, Northeastern University

Galaxies

Researchers using data from the South Pole Telescope, which takes sensitive measurements of the cosmic microwave background, identified 8,892 possible galaxy clusters, of which 7,190 have been confirmed using optical and infrared data. Galaxy clusters are unfathomably large structures that contain anywhere from hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound in a system by gravity, the largest gravitationally bound systems in the universe. About 20 percent of those confirmed clusters don’t appear in any previous catalog, and 67 percent of them (4,824 systems) had hot gas detected within them for the first time. This sample was drawn from just four percent of the sky.

Christina Nunez, University of Chicago

Singing Contests

Bird ownership is very popular in Indonesia thanks to a longstanding custom: the thought that owning a bird is a mark of success for a person. In the 1970s, singing competitions emerged, with the contests featuring up to 1,000 birds and being worth serious money as well as legitimate prestige for the owners. The issue is, wild-caught birds are perceived to have better song quality and a wider repertoire, so there’s high demand for wild-caught birds, which some fear is driving many species to extinction in the wild. Something like 30 percent of Indonesia’s population owns a bird, 90 million people, and there are some 164 million to 187 million wild-caught songbirds in captivity. The trade of wild-caught birds can be incredibly stressful for the animals, with estimated mortality ranging from 30 percent to 80 percent.

Sandy Ong, Knowable Magazine

Shinkansen

The governor of Shizuoka prefecture in Japan has approved the start of construction on the first leg of a proposed ultra-fast maglev train line that would connect Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka at speeds of 500 kilometers per hour. That stretch of country contains more than half of Japan’s population and accounts for $2.04 trillion in GDP, more than half the country’s total. Currently, the existing Shinkansen bullet train takes 90 minutes to get from Tokyo’s Shinagawa to Nagoya, and takes 2 hours 20 minutes to get from Shinagawa to Osaka. The new line would cut those travel times substantially, to 40 minutes and 67 minutes, respectively. The entire Tokyo-Osaka line was initially projected to open as early as 2037.

Yuka Furubayashi, Kiroki Akahori and Ryo Iisuka, Nikkei Asia

Diamonds

De Beers, the diamond mining colossus, has rolled out a drastic price cut and slashed the number of diamond buyers that receive its product. De Beers has strenuously avoided official price cuts because of the impact that such things have on diamond market sentiment, instead opting to sell discounted stones in secret sales. Well, the cut brings De Beers’ prices in line with the secondary market, over which De Beers had routinely claimed a five percent to 50 percent premium. Perhaps more interesting is that De Beers is cutting down on the number of customers it sells to; previously, De Beers moved most of its diamonds to a group of about 70 sightholders, but has trimmed that down to 45 to 50 buyers.

Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.com, and Thomas Biesheuvel, Bloomberg

Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated the population of Indonesia.

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