Numlock News: June 25, 2025 • Czech Beer, Japanese Eel, Roman Crabs

Jun 25, 2025

By Walt Hickey

California

The Los Angeles-based film industry has had to deal with the reality of other countries and states giving huge kickbacks to locally shot productions. Even though the city remains the headquarters of the film and television industry, this practice has eroded the Los Angeles production scene bit by bit. To that effect, California upped the amount it gives to productions that shoot there, increasing the number from $330 million to $750 million per year. That said, these efforts don’t seem to be luring back the big studio flicks, but rather are doing a decent job at racking up indie movies. This round, there are 48 titles selected to get $96 million in subsidies, but only five are feature films, while the rest are indies. California’s math says the incentives will generate $664 million in spending, resulting in the hiring of 6,500 cast and crew as well as 32,000 background performers.

Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter

Namibia

The African nation of Namibia (which has large tracts of desert and is on the Atlantic) sees serious potential in becoming a hydrogen energy powerhouse, specifically becoming a green steel producer. The startup HyIron has a production site in an area of the Namib Desert that averages only 30 hours of overcast skies per year, making it an enormously suitable location for solar and wind generation. The idea is to build out solar, hook it up to a hydrolysis plant that uses electricity to produce hydrogen and then use that hydrogen to either export or support green versions of heavy industry like steel production. The country is targeting 10-12 million tons of hydrogen per year by 2050.

Jonathan W. Rosen, MIT Technology Review

Unagi

This Friday is the deadline for Europe to decide whether or not it will propose including eel as an endangered species under the international framework CITES, severely restricting the ability to trade in eel stocks across borders. This would have the largest consequences for Japan, which imports 70-80 percent of its eel, known locally as unagi. While the European eel is already protected, the EU is moving to add 18 other species — which would include the Japanese eel — arguing that its inclusion is merited as populations have fallen sharply. Japan’s fisheries agency argued that the adult eel biomass was 17,000 tons and has been recovering since the 1990s. If the EU does propose including the eel, Japan has indicated it’ll fight the proposal when it comes up at the conference in 150 days.

Takumi Sasaki, Nikkei Asia

Czech Beer

Last month, the Czech Beer and Malt Association revealed the unthinkable: consumption of beer in Czechia fell to 126 liters per person, imperiling the nation’s title as the country that consumes the most beer per capita. That’s down from 163.5 liters per capita in 2005. The decline lately has been slower than in past years; it’s only slightly down from 128 liters per capita in 2023. Some point to a slight increase in a tax on draft beer, which went from 15 percent to 21 percent. The Czech beer market is home to 550 breweries in the country, though most are very small, and just four big breweries — Pilsner Urquell, Radegast, Gambrinus and Velkopopovický Kozel. These are all owned by the Japanese booze empire Asahi and account for 60 percent of all Czech beer production. Three other large beverage groups bring that total to 95 percent of production, with hundreds of little locals accounting for the last 5 percent.

Evan Rail, Vine Pair

Rome

Rome is full of historical sites, with public green space covering 35 percent of the city’s area, well over the 20 percent seen in London. That facilitates a ton of urban wildlife, with the fragile ruins serving as sanctuaries and natural corridors in the Eternal City. Rome is home to no fewer than 1,600 species of plants, 5,200 insects, 100 birds, 40 mammals and 30 reptile and amphibian species. Many of these species are non-native; let’s just say that detained kings of Gaul were not the only thing that Roman legions brought back in chains. There are also some uniquely adapted species that can’t be found elsewhere. Sometime 2,000 years ago, several Mediterranean freshwater crabs got trapped in the abandoned sewer drains under the city and lived in a series of canals and drainpipes cut off from outside populations. They have since developed a form of gigantism, growing 13 percent to 20 percent larger than their relatives outside the city.

Krista Langlois, bioGraphic

Attoseconds

Physicists are leveraging advances in lasers and other measurement technology to study molecular and atomic behavior at increasingly fine durations of time. They are intensely focused on getting measurements at an attosecond level of granularity, which is to say one quintillionth of a second. That’s where the action is in the world of atoms. It’s also potentially the fastest you can actually measure something, given that one attosecond is the amount of time it takes light to traverse the span of a single atom (186,000 miles per second). An electron orbiting an atomic nucleus completes that orbit in anywhere between 1 and 1,000 attoseconds, depending on the atom in question. To measure all this, you would need a femtosecond laser that produces infrared pulses at a rate of millionths to billionths of a second. Scientists then apply the technique that bagged the 2023 Nobel Prize in physics and do some high harmonic generation to get it up to attosecond pulses, in what’s referred to as pump-probe studies.

Ivan Amato, Knowable Magazine

Wallabies

Travel can be exhausting, and having an emotional support animal can be essential for many embarking on long and trying journeys. This makes it so relatable when discovering that ancient people established a population of brown forest wallabies on islands of Indonesia when they travelled around the archipelago in canoes. As early as 12,800 years ago, people captured wild wallabies and brought the animals with them on journeys. Researchers have found remains of wallabies dated to 8,000 years ago in caves. Now, what they were doing with those wallabies, next to all that charcoal, near all those sharpened bone tools, well, that’s a mystery, isn’t it?

Christa Lesté-Lasserre, New Scientist

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