Numlock News: March 27, 2026 • Numbers, Proverbs, Revelation

Mar 27, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!n

Jameson

A new analysis of bar menus from February 2025 to 2026 specifically looked at which liquor was being advertised in a “shots” section of a menu. Roughly 14,000 out of 120,000 menus included at least one shot. The analysis found that leading the pack with the most popular shot was Jameson, which appeared on 13 percent of menus that listed shots. On average, it set a drinker back $8.49, followed by Fireball with a 10 percent shot list market share and a price point of $6.48. Patrón (8 percent), Jagermeister (seven percent), and Don Julio (6.1 percent) round out the list.

Stephen Bradley, Vine Pair

Snail Food

Hawai’i was once home to vast populations of tree-dwelling snails, some 759 native species with shells ranging from two to 22 millimeters in size. Habitat loss and invasive species have pushed the snails to the brink, but several efforts are underway to breed captive populations that might be released back into the wild. The Snail Extinction Prevention Program is setting a goal of saving 60 species of ground- and tree-dwelling snail. There is a fascinating challenge, though, in raising the snails in captivity: it is not entirely obvious what the snails eat. They don’t actually eat the leaves on the trees; instead feasting on microbes that live there. Those microbes are not totally understood. For the past 40 years, snail experts have made do with a passable alternative, manufactured from a cultivated form of fungus related to air conditioner mold. It feeds the snails of Hawai’i, but it’s not exactly nutritionally ideal and leads to a breakdown in the snail microbiome in the long run. The SEPP team has now begun to sequence the DNA of microbes that live on the trees that the wild snails tend to eat from, but still mysteries abound, given the hundreds of microbes found.

Lela Nargi, bioGraphic

Seafood

Americans, in general, have a much smaller appetite for seafood compared to people in other countries. Globally, the average comes in at 45 pounds of seafood per person per year, with some European countries coming in around 90 pounds per capita and outliers like Iceland coming in with 200 pounds of fish per capita consumed. Americans prefer turf over surf, eating only 19 pounds of seafood per year — mostly shrimp and salmon. Admittedly, some factors have moved that needle a bit — sushi getting popular, for one — but the industry has recently begun to take a new approach to winning American palates: fashioning fish into jerky and meatballs and snacks and processed foods.

J.M. Hirsch, The Associated Press

Bees

Urban honeybees have been a popular addition to office buildings across large cities the world over. New York had just 68 registered hives in 2010, but today sees numbers well over 400. Some companies have emerged specifically to offer this service to building owners, such as Alvéole, a firm that manages 2,000 hives across 73 cities. In general, honeybee populations have recovered since the 2000s but remain pretty unstable year to year. Also our maintaining hives of Apis mellifera, the European honeybee, rather than local bees means those hives can be susceptible to pests and disease and mites that can cause widespread die-offs.

Andrew Zaleski, Bloomberg

Proverbs

A new survey polled various different proverbs or aphorisms to see which people actually agreed with. Generally amenable phrases include “Actions speak louder than words,” which enjoyed 92 percent agreement and just one percent disagreement, “Honesty is the best policy” (82 percent agree, four percent disagree) and “Never judge a book by its cover” (81 percent agree, five percent disagree). The most heavily disagreed with proverbs included “If you can't beat them, join them” (49 percent disagree, 23 percent agree), “The customer is always right” (47 percent disagree, 31 percent agree) and “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” (43 percent disagree, 37 percent agree.) Respondents were split on “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Men and women often favored different aphorisms. Women were considerably more likely to agree that “Cheaters never prosper” and “Good things come to those who wait” while men were more likely to agree that “Nice guys finish last,” “There's no such thing as a free lunch” and “Fortune favors the bold.”

David Montgomery, YouGov

Revelation

A fascinating study from the Pew Research Center analyzed 439,711 hours of programming on 4,328 religious radio stations across America to find out what this substantial niche of the American airwaves was actually putting out there. In many states, religious radio comprises more than a fifth of all radio stations; in North Carolina, 35.9 percent of all stations are religious in nature, a percentage followed by Texas (34.1 percent) and Nebraska (32.2 percent). The average American can listen to six different religious broadcasts from their home address, and many do so; 45 percent of respondents to a survey conducted by Pew ever listened to religious programming. Music is generally very popular in on the stations, with an interesting exception of the Catholic stations. Non-Catholic Christian radio stations averaged 13 hours, 17 minutes per day of music, with the rest made up by talk (four hours, 44 minutes) and services (three hours, 58 minutes). On Catholic radio, there was just two hours 35 minutes of music a day, with a bigger focus on talk programming making up 15 hours and eight minutes of air time per day.

Samuel Bestvater, Athena Chapekis, Skyler Seets, Sono Shah and Aaron Smith, Pew Research Center

Numbers

A deeply interesting new study found that research into microplastics may experience cross-contamination because of the standard practice of scientists using gloves to handle laboratory equipment. Chemists at the University of Michigan were attempting to determine levels of microplastics inhaled when outside and found an odd result when plastic counts in the air came in 1,000 times greater than previous reports. They found that laboratory gloves — which are considered best practice for lab use — can transfer particles of stearate salts to surface samples. The stearate salts help gloves cleanly release from their mold in the manufacturing process, and are similar to soap molecules. While they’re not considered microplastics, they are structurally similar enough to polyethylene (which is a very common microplastic) that it’s actually difficult for researchers to distinguish them with vibrational spectroscopy — a common mechanism of identification. The researchers found they needed to keep a look out for this kind of contamination needs; gloves can contribute 7,000 particles per square millimeter that may be misidentified as microplastics.

Anne McNeil and Madeline Clough, The Conversation

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