Numlock News: June 5, 2026 • Quasar, NeeDoh, Sagrada Família

Jun 05, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Sunflowers

The volatile price of cocoa has sent major food brands scrambling to find alternatives with a similar taste and mouthfeel. The price of cocoa shot up from $2,846 per metric ton at the start of 2023 to as high as $10,710 per ton in 2025, and has only recently come down to around $2,471 per ton. For large food brands, that kind of volatility is hard to work with, hence the search for a broader range of cocoa-free chocolate. Barry Callebaut, a brand you have probably never heard of but which is indeed the largest cocoa processor and chocolate ingredient supplier in the world, hopes to have a cocoa-free chocolate called ChoViva, derived from sunflower seeds, available in the U.S. as soon as this year.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Hoops

There are about 2,900 basketball hoops in parks in New York City, and many of those hoops are missing nets. Whether the result of damage or deterioration, the parks department can be slow to repair those afflicted hoops. This has provoked community action; Some rec leagues fix ups the nets as a matter of policy, while others prefer the strategy of the basketball ronin, such as Craig Campanella, who goes around Queens attaching $10.99 white nylon nets to hoops missing them.

Katie Honan, The City Reporter

MAVEN

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft was launched in 2013 and orbited Mars for 11 years, well outlasting the original mission length, to study the planet’s atmosphere. On December 6, 2025, when it was on the other side of Mars in an occultation scheduled to last under an hour, it stopped phoning home. A computer 200 million miles away is hard to reach under even ideal conditions, and after months, NASA has called it and ended efforts to search for MAVEN. One concerning piece of data is that faint telemetry and Doppler shift data fragments teased out of the recorded signals in the hours after the signal loss indicates that MAVEN was spinning at 2.7 revolutions per minute, faster than expected. It indicates a problem the spacecraft couldn’t recover from and that its batteries were likely drained within hours. It’ll probably remain in orbit for another 50 to 100 years before, poetically, burning up in the very atmosphere it was sent to study.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Sagrada Família

Next week Pope Leo XIV will bless the Tower of Jesus Christ in Barcelona’s basilica, the Sagrada Família, which has finally been completed. The basilica itself has been under construction for 144 years at this point, but the recent installation of a cross on the central lantern tower of the church — the 18th and final one — completes the structure and will bring the cranes down. Obviously, as anyone who has embarked on a construction project can attest, work will indeed continue for another several years as the last odds and ends get cleared up. When 30-year-old Antoni Gaudí took over the project after less than a year of construction in 1882, he said that it’d be done within 10 years. When he repeatedly extended his deadlines on the project, he famously said “my client is not in a rush,” referring to God. Evidently disagreeing, the Almighty moved to replace management in 1926 when Gaudí was run over by a tram.

Alexandra F. Coego, The Art Newspaper

Boards

The percentage of corporate directors over the age of 70 is now 22.7 percent of all board members for companies within the Russel 3000. A new high, that is up from 18.4 percent as recently as 2023. While many companies sought younger board members throughout the 2010s in order to help in digital transitions, there has been a sharp increase in older board members since 2024.

Victor Swezey, Bloomberg

Easy Breezy

A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal looks at a quasar known as J2318, found in the Pegasus constellation, and found that in the disk of matter surrounding the black hole, the wind speed is the fastest on record. The black hole has a mass 1.7 billion times that of the Sun, and according to the study, the gas is moving towards it at 30 percent of the speed of light

Sandra McLean, York University

NeeDoh

The global market for stress toys is projected to grow from $5.88 billion in 2025 to $7.95 billion in 2030, thanks in part to rising levels of stress and anxiety among adults and also presumably in part to the ability to cheaply produce more durable, malleable plastic products. This is a remarkably popular class of toy, the heirs to the fidget toy trends. And one of the stalwarts of the field is NeeDohs, which are squishy gel-filled stress toys that sell for $3 to $6 a pop and which have moved a lot of volume since emerging in 2017. The toymaker behind the viral toy has a plan to keep them relevant beyond this particular trend, which isn’t really saying that much, admittedly, because all toymakers behind viral toys usually say something like that.

Sunny Kim, Bloomberg

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke with Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, a physicist and journalist who is out with a new book, Entangled States: Life According to Quantum Physics. It’s a great read about the frontiers of physics, part memoir and part dive into the fascinating idiosyncrasies of particle physics. Entangled States is available wherever books are sold. You can find them at New Scientist or their personal Substack Ultracold.

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