Numlock News: May 12, 2025 • Alchemy, Laugh Track, Matcha

May 12, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Laugh Track

Despite being generally dismissed by both so-called prestigious comedies and modern documentary-style sitcoms, as well as being a point of derision for fans of television comedy, laugh tracks are doing just fine. Canned laughter on sitcoms remains a very popular way of producing these shows, with more laugh-track multi-cam comedies airing on broadcast television (7 sitcoms) than non-laugh-tracked single-cam comedies (just five). Whether its the chortles of a live studio audience, the Laff Box (which contained 320 different laughs taped during the 1950s), or just laughter.mp3 sprinkled into sitcoms, the simple fact is that whether or not audiences like them, some part of their brain seems to appreciate laugh tracks, and so the laughs persist.

James Hibberd, The Hollywood Reporter

Matcha

Exports of green tea from Japan hit 8,798 tonnes last year, 10 times the amount that was internationally shipped 20 years ago. Powdered tea, predominantly matcha, accounted for 58 percent of the total, stoked by high global demand for the green beverage. Tea farmers in the country are reluctant to change business operations that have been running for decades, if not centuries, so the industry does not scale up in production in ways you would ordinarily see. Production of green tea is, in fact, down over the past two decades, so supplies of matcha are particularly tight this year. Overall, U.S. buyers accounted for 44 percent of shipments of Japanese powdered tea.

Tamayo Muto, Nikkei Asia

Hold

Marvel’s Thunderbolts* won the box office weekend with $33.1 million domestically, down only 55 percent from $74 million upon debut. That’s a pretty reasonable decline (pretty much average for Marvel), and if you’re wondering why that might be a relief, it’s because second weekends have been a bit of a bloodbath for Marvel during the post-Endgame era. Captain America: Brave New World fell 68 percent, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania dropped 70 percent, The Marvels fell 78 percent and Thor: Love and Thunder fell 67 percent. That makes a fairly normal 55 percent drop seem downright merciful. Globally, the movie has made $272 million.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Boat

They say the two best days of a boat owner’s life are when they get a boat and when they get rid of the boat. For one vessel, the difference between its last divestiture and most recent acquisition is 3,600 years. A reed boat abandoned in a canal on the plains outside of Uruk in what is now Iraq was rediscovered in 2017. Dating the boat beguiled researchers — bone fragments nearby were dated between 2100 and 1800 BCE, but bone fragments ain’t that hard to come by in the vicinity of ancient metropoles. Only after turning to a technique called optically stimulated luminescence, which is an estimate of how long it’s been since a material was exposed to sunlight, did researchers come to an estimate of 3600 years ago. Now, because this is a newly obtained boat, they want to restore it and fix it up; buddy, good luck, that’s gonna bleed you dry.

Elise Cutts, Science

Alchemy

A new analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider’s experiments from 2015 to 2018 has finally pulled off the dream of Europe’s alchemists: turning lead into gold. The experiment aimed beams of lead traveling at close to the speed of light. When the lead ions collide in a specific way, the collision sometimes causes the nucleus to eject three protons, which turns the lead into gold. According to the analysis, the LHC ultimately created 86 billion gold nuclei in this manner, or about 29 trillionths of a gram, with most of the gold atoms lasting for less than 1 microsecond before smashing into other stuff. Either way, we’re chalking that up as a W for the alchemists, and the chemists owe them one, God knows they’ve earned it. After boiling all that urine in an attempt to produce the philosopher’s stone, only to accidentally discover phosphorus, we really ought to let them have this.

Elizabeth Gibney, Nature

Bones

A 15th-century medical institution for the poor, founded by the Duke of Milan, disposed of dead bodies by dropping them into brick-lined vaults under a church in what was intended to be a large ossuary. That plan failed for a couple of reasons, but even still, that crypt contains the remains of tens of thousands of impoverished people of Milan. A team of archaeologists, geneticists and other specialists examined some 300,000 bones out of an estimated 2.9 million preserved in layers more than a meter deep. They have also discovered an entirely new kind of soil called “thanatogenic anthrosoil” that, well, if this is your thing, it’s definitely worth reading on about.

Andrew Curry, Science

Revlimid

Since its first approval by the Food and Drug Administration in December 2005, the price of the cancer drug Revlimid has increased 26 times. Upon launch, each pill cost $218 a pop, for a yearly price of $55,000. A few months later, when the drug was approved for multiple myeloma, the price increased to $280 per pill, or $70,560 a year. Today, it stands at $892 per pill. The galling part of all of this is that, through the entire process, according to a deposition of a Celgene executive marked “highly confidential,” the cost to manufacture each pill of Revlimid has remained a steady 25 cents per pill.

David Armstrong, ProPublica

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