Numlock News: June 30, 2025 • Domino, Nuvvuagittuq, Masters of Prophecy

Jun 30, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Love On Top

Beyoncé played 12 May shows in the Cowboy Carter Tour, grossing $157.4 million in the month. This number is the second-highest monthly gross in Boxscore’s records going back to 2019. The only higher-grossing month, per Boxscore, was… Beyoncé in August 2023, when she grossed $179.3 million during the Renaissance tour. There have been seven instances where an artist grossed over $100 million in a single month of touring in these past years, and incidentally, Beyoncé was responsible for four of them.

Eric Frankenberg, Billboard

F1

A fledgling movie studio’s long search for a box office hit has finally succeeded, as Apple’s F1 launched to $144 million globally. Of that, $55.6 million was made domestically in the North American market, while an impressive $88.4 million was made abroad. This makes sense; after all, that is where most of the fans of F1 actually live. It carried a solid $250 million production budget and will need to leg out a bit to make it back. However, given that Apple has operated its film production studio as a loss leader and basically a jobs program for aging directors, it’s a win. IMAX was a huge driver for F1, with its screens accounting for 19 percent of overall revenue — the fourth-highest percentage in IMAX’s history.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

YouTube

In January, the most popular account on YouTube that produced its generative AI videos was pulling in 2.5 million subscribers and 220 million views. That barely made it into the top 20. Now, though, the YouTube algorithm has been rewarding such channels, and they’ve begun to show up in the monthly rankings. In May, four out of the top 10 YouTube channels by subscribers featured AI material in every one of their videos, and as of June, the top four AI channels have bagged 23 million subscribers and 800 million views. The fastest-growing channel on YouTube — Masters of Prophecy — went from just a few hundred subscribers in February to over 30 million, and all of its content is AI.

Ryan Broderick and Adam Bumas, Sherwood News

UV

The ozone layer protects Earth from UV-C light, which is the shortest wavelength of radiation that the sun throws our way. UV-C light is used for all kinds of disinfecting purposes, mostly because we have not found many things that it can’t kill. A powerful UV-C lamp emits 20 times more radiation than what one might experience on Mars, killing the most radiation-resistant life form on Earth — a bacteria named Deinococcus radiodurans — in under a minute. That being said, a new study published in Astrobiology describes one organism that appears to be immune to UV-C: a nifty desert-dwelling lichen called Clavascidium lacinulatum. It was put under the UV-C lamp for three months and survived, with the experiment only concluding because the experimenter’s master’s thesis was due. When the surviving lichen was cultured, it sprouted new colonies after two weeks.

Hannah Richter, Science

Coupons

The era of couponing has ended after years of decline. Marketers distributed 50 billion coupons last year, based on one industry estimate, down from 330 billion coupons at the height of the extreme couponing days of 2010. Last year, only 750 million coupons were redeemed, down from 3.3 billion in 2010. One reason for the coupon business drying up is that people are spending less of their time shopping than they were in the past, and thus devote less time to bargain hunting and coupon collecting. Paper coupons still dominate — they make up 87 percent of coupons — but digital coupons actually performed way better, making up two-thirds of redeemed coupons.

Oyin Adedoyin, The Wall Street Journal

Earth

The Canadian Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt rock formation has been dated to 4.16 billion years old, making it the prime contender for the oldest rocks on Earth. The rocks had been previously dated to 4.3 billion and 3.8 billion years old. However, the new study sampled a different section of rock, applied the previous two dating techniques and found that both of them converged on 4.16 billion years. This is impressive because Earth only formed 4.5 billion years ago, and the earliest rocks melted and were recycled by the tectonic plates.

Adithi Ramakrishnan, The Associated Press

Sugar

A sugar factory in Yonkers, New York will close after 130 years of operation, a move that will continue the deindustrialization of the Hudson River. The Hudson had long been a major industrial powerhouse until those manufacturing jobs moved elsewhere, and the New York City area moved away from that kind of heavy industry. The Domino Sugar plant receives about 40 maritime deliveries of raw sugar per year, mostly dry bulk barges brought up from West Palm Beach and Caribbean sugar delivered by bulk ships. The plant was one of the last remaining manufacturers that still used the river for freighting. What’s left is a wallboard plant 20 miles north that still gets maritime deliveries of Spanish gypsum, a cement plant in Ravenna and a chemical plant in Albany that gets magnesium chloride delivered by the tanker-load.

Daniel Katzive, gCaptain

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