Numlock News: June 9, 2025 • Arsenic, Venus Fly Trap, Peppa Pig
By Walt Hickey
Welcome back!
Peppa
Peppa Pig, the children’s character that has permanently scarred the vocabulary of an entire generation by introducing words like “lorries” and “petrol,” is 20 years old at this point. To freshen things up, the Pig family has added a new kid, a baby named Evie. This was a big deal for a show with the global reach of Peppa Pig. In addition to an in-theater event at 2,600 theaters across 20 markets called Peppa Meets the Baby Cinematic Experience, the franchise released Peppa Meets the Baby — The Album with two new streaming singles. That doesn’t even begin to touch on the publishing empire; Scholastic has published Peppa books for 11 years, has sold 27 million copies in the franchise and is pushing out about six titles a year. This year, Scholastic dialed up the output with three new titles entirely dedicated to the new pig.
Karen Raugust, Publishers Weekly
GPS
The Global Positioning System of satellites was launched in 1993, and the constellation of 24 satellites (plus spares) orbiting 12,550 miles above the Earth has become central to the operation of all sorts of electronics. There are a couple of similar state-level systems — Europe’s Galileo, Russia’s GLONASS, China’s Beidou — but there’s still room in the industry for other satellite navigation systems that avoid some of the pitfalls of those services. For instance, given their distance, GPS is comparatively easy to jam, suppress or disrupt. When considering some of the solutions that use the system (such as UAVs), something a bit stronger may be advantageous. That’s one reason behind Xona Space Systems striving to build a constellation called Pulsar, a constellation of 258 satellites in low Earth orbit that would be 12,000 miles closer.
Tereza Pultarova, MIT Technology Review
If Books Could Kill
The University of St Andrews has developed a new tool to quickly identify potentially poisonous books, which is a real issue when you’re talking historical publishing. Everybody loves a rich, gorgeous emerald green color for book covers, and for years, the main way to accomplish the effect is soaking that sucker in arsenic and copper. After long exposures, these two substances will poison you. Some libraries just put all their green books from a certain era into a forbidden shelf out of an abundance of caution — the University of Bielefeld, for instance, isolated 60,000 books last year — but this new device from St Andrews can quickly detect toxic pigments.
Carnivores
Carnivorous plants like the Cape sundew and Venus flytraps are fascinating, betraying their photosynthetic ancestry and crossing the clades to prey on actual animals. The oldest fossils of carnivorous plants go back 34 million years, preserved in amber and described in a 2014 study. Carnivorous plants are believed to have evolved at least ten times, and the oldest pollen records of carnivorous plant groups date to the Eocene, which lasted from 55 million years ago to 33.9 million years ago.
Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine
Trading Cards
The global trading card market reached an estimated $7.08 billion in 2023 and has been largely driven by Japanese intellectual property. The Pokémon franchise has published 64.8 billion cards since its debut. The overall market for trading cards is projected to double to $14.9 billion by 2030, and Japan’s chunk of the market is going to be central to that number. There, trading cards are the top-selling toy category by retail value and make up 27 percent of Japan’s total toy sector, accounting for 277.4 billion yen in fiscal 2023.
Reika Mihara, Takuro Suzuki, Annu Nishioka and Kanon Wakabayashi, Nikkei Asia
Psych
For years, the science of psychology has grappled with what many consider to be a reliability crisis. A lot of the field’s scientific literature was published despite small sample sizes and “fragile” statistical results — papers where the level of statistical significance was just on the cusp of being publishable, as expressed by a p value only slightly lower than 0.05. A new study found that, potentially as a result of those concerns being raised, the scientific literature in psychology has been getting more statistically robust over the past two decades. By chance alone, 26 percent of published results should fall into the fragile p value range of 0.01 and 0.05, if everything is above board. In 2004, 32 percent of p values were in the fragile range, suggesting that bias might be at play. But by 2024, that number is down to 26 percent, pretty much what we’d expect if a high level of rigor is being brought to what is published.
Ballerina
Experiment 626 beat the Baba Yaga this weekend. The inexplicably titled From the World of John Wick: Ballerina missed expectations and came in with just $25 million, behind the $32.5 million made by Lilo & Stitch in its third weekend. Building momentum towards the tail end of the list is The Phoenician Scheme, which expanded from six locations last week to 1,678 screens. It brought in $6.3 million for the weekend: the top per-location average of the year to date so far.
Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter
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