Numlock News: June 10, 2026 • Pineapples, Pleistocene, Pods

Jun 10, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Pineapple

The pineapple business Fresh Del Monte has spent years developing special and limited-edition varieties of the fruit that have been selling at eye-popping price points. Your standard pineapple goes for like $3, but the company’s premium pineapples can sell for hundreds. Their Honeyglow specialty pineapple, which is ultra-sweet, serves as the entry point to the world of pricey pineapples, selling for $5 to $8. The Pinkglow is pink, and goes for $30. Their Rubyglow is the real rare article, it’s a cross between a typical pineapple and the inedible Morada pineapple, with a red exterior and a sweet yellow interior; it’s a fickle fruit to grow and averages $395 each. It takes about 15 years to develop a new variety of pineapple using conventional breeding, and once you’ve actually got the desired fruit, pineapples take 18 months to grow.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Heraldry

The College of Arms was founded in 1484 and operates as a part of the United Kingdom’s Royal Household, tasked primarily with genealogical research to determine who is eligible to use an existing coat of arms and also granting new heraldry to people and companies that pay them to do so. This comes up in Britain, as you’re technically not allowed to join the Order of the Garter without one, but it also comes up in America. Despite the anti-monarchial disposition of my country’s founders, in the interim, a bunch of wannabe subjects yearn for the trappings of aristocracy and are willing to shell out to score a shield so they can cosplay gentility. The fee is about $12,000 for the genealogical research and design work that goes into granting the arrivistes arms, and the College of Arms grants about 120 per year, with about a tenth going to non-British citizens.

Helen Lewis, The Atlantic

Conflict

The latest data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program found that the number of interstate conflicts doubled for the second year in a row in 2025, according to data published in the Journal of Peace Research. Last year, there were eight interstate conflicts, the highest figure since UCDP began collecting data in 1946, up from two in 2023. Overall, there were 65 conflicts in which states were involved on one or both sides during the year (including not just inter-state wars but also internal conflicts). That number is the highest since 1946, and 13 of those conflicts saw at least 1,000 battle-related deaths over the course of the calendar year, the highest number since 1992. With 244,600 people killed in organized violence in 2025, it was the second-bloodiest year since 1994, when the Rwandan genocide occurred.

Uppsala University

Sunscreen

In 2020, Congress ordered the FDA to overhaul how it approved sunscreens in an attempt to make it easier to approve worldwide sun protection formulas for use in the United States, which technically treats sunscreen as an over-the-counter drug and therefore has made it onerous to get new chemistry approved. In 2024, DSM Nutritionals asked the FDA for approval of a sunscreen based on bemotrizinol (BEMT), which is a sunscreen in use already in Europe and Asia. Following a safety review, it has become the first new sunscreen ingredient approved for sale in the U.S. since the 1990s. It comes at a moment when counter-scientific wellness movements have attempted to make an enemy out of chemical sun protection; from 2021 to 2024, the percentage of Americans who believe sunscreen is toxic increased from 17 percent to 24 percent.

Dylan Scott, Vox

Play

The $40 billion youth sports industry has led to a surge in construction of private facilities where competitive leagues can practice and train. Hundreds of millions of dollars has been poured into developing retail and entertainment complexes built around youth sports. A 2025 survey from the Aspen Institute found that 20 percent of kids aged six to 17 play in a private club, as wealthy families ditch community sports programs for in-depth and expensive training.

Patrick Sisson, Bloomberg

Pods

The market for coffee pods was estimated to be $40.49 billion in 2024, and that’s projected to rise to $58.19 billion in 2030. There’s a significant amount of waste that results from this style of coffee distribution, with each cup of coffee made requiring a container (usually plastic) to go to waste, a problem that some producers have attempted to solve through recycling programs with little success. Lavazza is introducing a single-serve coffee pod that does not have an individual wrapper or coating, a coffee tab called Tablì, following a successful introduction in Italy. The pods and the device that uses them are the result of five years of R&D and over 15 patents.

Laurel Deppen, Food Dive

Scrat

A fascinating new study analyzed the fossilized feces of ground squirrels who lived during the last ice age that was found in permafrost and managed to unlock a new way to study the world that exists beyond the scope of carbon dating: ancient DNA preserved in 700,000 year old scat. DNA tends to age very badly, but DNA in ancient poop tended to hold up considerably better than in ancient lake bed sediments, and is host to a vast trove of environmental DNA. The analyzed samples ranged from 17,000 years old to 700,000 years old, finding genetic traces of grasses, flowering herbs, arachnids, insects, large mammals like mammoths, bison and horses and more. If there’s a downside to this incredible discovery of the DNA of ancient species, it’s that I shudder to think how the next Jurassic Park sequel is going to handle and incorporate this particular coprolite.

Moria Donovan, bioGraphic

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