Numlock News: May 16, 2025 • Voyager 1, Orange Cats, Magna Carta
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
Magna Carta
In 1946, Harvard Law School purchased what was believed to be an unofficial copy of the Magna Carta for $27.50 (about $450 today) that had been made in 1327. The school then proceeded to stash it away in a library. A new analysis from two medieval history professors has concluded that it’s, in fact, a bona fide lost original Magna Carta and may very well be worth millions. The Magna Carta was issued by King John in 1215 and introduced the still damn well relevant writ of habeas corpus. There were probably something like 200 originals made and sent out around England, of which 24 editions made between 1215 and 1300 survived. The handwriting and dimensions of the document — badly faded in some places — appeared to be consistent with the six previously known originals from 1300.
Haowang Guarantee
The largest darknet marketplace for crypto scammers and money laundering in the world has been operating on Telegram for years. The marketplace is a one-stop shop for illicit finance called Haowang Guarantee, once known as Huione Guarantee. On Monday, the messaging service banned thousands of accounts related to the underworld firm, and has effectively killed the platform, with the entity announcing it has closed up shop. As of January, one report pegged $24 billion in total transactions on the service, a figure that has since risen to a final tally of $27 billion.
Tungsten
The price of the mineral tungsten — notoriously dense and used in lots of alloys and aerospace, semiconductor and industrial applications — in Europe has just passed $400 per metric ton of ammonium paratungstate, which is the key intermediary of the metal. That’s up 18 percent since February, and the highest price since 2013. Last year, China dominated global production, being responsible for 67,000 tons of the 81,000 produced, and export curbs have sent the rest of the world scrambling to get their hands on a supply. Not helping matters for Western countries: following Vietnam (which produced 3,400 tons), the highest individual producers are Russia and North Korea. There’s a pretty small market for tungsten, but the industries that rely on a steady supply of small amounts of it are absolutely massive.
Voyager 1
Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now 15.5 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away from Earth, and relies on thrusters to ensure that it’s pointed in the correct direction to phone home. Throughout the decades that it has been in space, those thrusters have taken a beating, but a clever maneuver from NASA has brought once-dead thrusters back online and may very well add time to the mission. The original roll thrusters on Voyager 1 stopped working in 2004 when power was lost to to heaters, and since then, it has used the backup roll thrusters to stay on course. At the time, engineers didn’t think they could be fixed, and also didn’t think the spacecraft even had much life left in it, so the backups were just fine. Now, though, the backups appear to be getting clogged, and there was a deadline looming — the antenna in Canberra is the only one capable of sending a sufficiently powerful signal to reach the Voyager probes, and it was set to go offline for 10 months of upgrades on May 4. On March 20, the team executed a fix that brought the thrusters back from the dead and pulled off yet another miracle to keep Voyager 1 transmitting.
Orange Cats
A new study analyzed DNA from 18 cats to figure out why orange cats have the fur they do; it found that all the orange cats analyzed had a deleted stretch of DNA in the non-coding region of the ARHGAP36 gene. They found that when missing, ARHGAP36 remains active, and the gene being active may change the kinds of pigments produced in skin and hair. It may alter the process away from the dark eumelanin and towards lighter pheomelanin, which is responsible for the orange fur. The study was as yet unable to articulate why essentially every orange cat I have ever encountered is, if you’ll excuse the scientific jargon, the dumbest animal to ever grace the Earth.
No I In Team
For the most part, professional sports teams tend to have more Instagram followers than any one of their players do, given the long continuity of a sports franchise, the itinerant nature of professional play and the ultimate limitations of stardom. For instance, 90.6 percent of NHL teams have more Instagram followers than their most-followed player, as do 73.3 percent of MLB teams and 71.9 percent of NFL teams. The star-driven NBA is the lowest among the big four male pro sports, with just 33.3 percent of its teams dwarfing their largest player. However, in women’s sports, this trend is completely inverted. Take, at most extreme, the WNBA, where every single team has fewer Instagram followers than their most popular player. Indeed, in some situations, teams have vastly fewer followers than several of their players; heck, the Seattle Storm has fewer followers than six of its players.
BEOS
Police in India are adopting a controversial (and some argue pseudoscientific) brain scanning technology to discern guilt among suspects known as brain electrical oscillation signature profiling, or BEOS. There have been at least 700 police investigations in India involving serious crimes where the suspects underwent a BEOS test, which multiple scientific and legal experts claim relies on little evidence and has minimal vetting among the scientific community. The systems can cost $118,000 and are derived from technologies pioneered in the United States, but were dismissed by the CIA and FBI in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to my friend Uri Bram. He’s currently the writer of the newsletter Atoms vs. Bits, and he’s the publisher of the newsletter The Browser. Uri’s been working on a really fun project lately expanding out a party puzzle game he designed several years ago into — Person Do Thing — into full-fledged physical game that he’s been getting made, shipped, packaged and sold to launch this Fall. Being the huge fan I am of his work and just so fascinated by how stuff gets made, I wanted to talk to him all about what it’s like to both design a game and participate in global trade in Spring 2025.
The game’s great, and if you’re into party games like Codenames or Taboo and the like you’d probably dig it and should check out a preorder.
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Love the Voyager story. I wonder, when it was launched did even the most optimistic of the engineers who were involved in the project imagine that the probe would still be working almost half a century later?
It’d be interesting to see The Magna Carta analyzed from a DEI perspective…..