Numlock News: May 23, 2025 • Atomic Clock, Around the Horn, Saturn
By Walt Hickey
We’re off Monday in observance of Memorial Day! Paid subscribers will still get a Sunday edition, and everyone else will get a bonus newsletter with a couple of unlocked Sunday editions so you can see what you’re missing.
Speaking of which, for the next two weeks, we’re celebrating Numlock’s seventh anniversary!
Apple of Knowledge
Honeycrisp apples were the undisputed top of the barrel, with their intensely sweet flavor upending the apple cart and changing the game for the entire industry. That said, and I think we’ve all kind of noticed this, Honeycrisps have gotten worse, right? This is partially a result of the very thing that makes Honeycrisps particularly unique as a variety: it was bred — from its earliest form as tree MN1711 at the University of Minnesota in 1983 — for taste, taste and nothing but taste. This is the obvious reason the variety tastes great, but other qualities (a sufficiently thick skin to survive transportation in an industrialized agricultural environment, for one) are notably absent. While the apple was bred for Minnesota, once the apple-growing juggernaut of Washington State and the system of trucks, freezers and stores that form the apple supply chain got hold of it, things started deviating from that platonic ideal of an apple. The breed suffers after spending up to seven months in common storage, unlike its peers, and does, in fact, taste worse nowadays. Today, there’s an oversupply of the apples, a surplus of 71 percent of the five-year average, selling for just $1.70 per pound.
Around the Horn
Yesterday was the final episode of Around the Horn, the ESPN gameshow-meets-debate-show program that has aired for the past 23 years. Over the course of 4,953 episodes, an ever-rotating group of sportswriters has debated (to various degrees of success) the dominant issues of the day. The show became not just a magnifier of regional sportswriting talent but also an incubator for the most compelling and exciting voices in the industry. There have been 60 Around the Horn panelists, of whom 53 won at least one episode. The G.O.A.T. of the show was easily Woody Paige of the Denver Post, with 2,964 appearances and 688 wins across the program’s run, followed by Tim Cowlishaw (2113 appearances, 550 wins), Bill Plaschke (1,757 appearances and 427 wins) and Kevin Blackistone (1,607 appearances and 385 wins).
Saturn
Earlier this year, a new paper revealed a whole new set of 128 moons for Saturn that had been confirmed back in March. A decade ago, there were 62 known moons of Saturn, and today there are 274 official satellites. One person — Edward Ashton — has helped to discover 192 of those moons. He’s now a postdoc at the Academia Sinica Instiute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, and only got into the brisk business of discovering moons of Saturn when an academic advisor suggested it might be a nifty project for his Ph. D. way back in 2018 at the University of British Columbia. The cool part is that these moons were just waiting to be discovered in the vast data troves of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, which can capture moons by taking sequential images of the same patch of sky over a three-hour period. It was this technique that detected the moons of Uranus and Neptune.
Meghan Bartels, Scientific American
Motorcycles
The motorcycle capital of the world is India, which bought 19.61 million motorcycles in 2024, increasing 9 percent year over year. Honda already has four plants there, and is planning to bring on another production line at its Gujarat plant by 2027. The company is aiming to increase its production capacity by 650,000 units in India and raise the capacity of the Gujarat plant in particular from 1.96 million per year to 2.61 million units. That would allow the Gujarat plant to eclipse the one in Karnataka, India, to become its biggest motorcycle plant in the world. Honda’s got a 27 percent market share in the country, narrowly behind local manufacturer Hero MotoCorp’s 29 percent.
Science
Federal funding of the sciences has collapsed, according to a new analysis. From 2015 to 2024, the National Science Foundation funded $2 billion worth of grants each year through May 21, though in 2025 that figure is 51 percent lower at $989 million. Beyond that, over 1,600 active grants, worth $1.5 billion, for existing research projects have been terminated. Funding for STEM education is down from $280 million on average over the previous 10 years to just $56 million. Funding for math, physics and chemistry is down 67 percent from $432 million to $143 million, and funding for engineering research is down 57 percent from $221 million to $94 million.
Aatish Bhatia, Irineo Cabreros, Asmaa Elkeurti and Ethan Singer, The New York Times
Hurricanes
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration comes out with its projection for the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, which kicks off on June 1. This year, NOAA projects 13 to 19 named storms, of which 6 to 10 will become hurricanes. At the high end of estimates, that would mean a particularly rowdy hurricane season. However, if this year comes in at the lower end of the estimate, it would be somewhat quieter than a typical storm season. Given that we’re in the neutral phase between El Niño (which tends to have sleepier seasons) and La Niña (which has rougher ones) climate patterns, things look pretty even.
Colin Zarzycki, The Conversation
Atomic Clock
Last month, the Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space launched into orbit from Florida, en route to the International Space Station. These are two connected atomic clocks (one based on cesium and the other on hydrogen atoms) that, when used together, produce a much more accurate measurement of time than either clock (or other clocks!) can by themselves. Atomic clocks in current GPS satellites lose or gain a second every 300 years, but the ACES clock won’t even gain or lose a second in 300 million years. Once set up, the clocks will link to the most accurate clocks on Earth to synchronize the networks and perform tests of physics, and most importantly, make gravitational measurements that can help measure elevation. The most exciting use will be establishing a perfect global zero point from which to measure elevation. This will help measure water and sea levels globally, capable of measuring altitudes with 10-centimeter precision, and successor clocks can help get down to a centimeter or sub-centimeter precision.
Sophia Chen, MIT Technology Review
This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to the brilliant Susana Polo, the author of the book The Year of the Ring, which collects an incredible project launched by the games and culture website Polygon that dives into The Lord of the Rings. I loved the book, and when the news was announced that Polygon had been sold and much of its staff laid off, I wanted to have Susana on to talk about the book, the work she and her colleagues did at Polygon and why this franchise has been just so enduring and touched so many people. The book is available wherever books are sold.
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1) Heh heh. Heh heh. He said "Uranus". Heh heh. Heh heh.
2) EVERYONE knows that Granny Smith apples are the best!
I read an article years ago (The New Yorker?) that explained this happens to all the good apples. A new variety is bred, everyone loves it, scaling it up for industrial agriculture ruins it. The same is true of beer, IMO. Stay away from my Macouns!!