Numlock News: May 30, 2025 • Seahorses, Leonidas, North Korea
By Walt Hickey
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Nuked
Epirus is a 185-person startup in California that has been developing a massive anti-drone microwave beam. called Leonidas, on behalf of the U.S. Army. Though they obviously didn’t finish reading the Wikipedia page for The Battle of Thermopylae to figure out how things went for ol’ Leonidas, the tech isn’t neat. The system looks like a trailer, hosting a garage door on a swivel mount with dozens of microwave amplifier units in a grid, at the core of which is a high-voltage, high-temperature gallium nitride chip. Instead of pointing at each drone in a swarm of drones, the Leonidas can hit everything in a 60-degree arc, frying their circuitry and dropping them out of the sky. Epirus delivered four units on their $66 million initial contract, or about $16.5 million each. Given that there’s no per-unit ammunition cost like you’d see with a Stinger missile, there’s decent value here if they can get it to work operationally.
Sam Dean, MIT Technology Review
Nautical Nonsense
Last week, North Korea suffered a mishap when a new 470-foot-long, 5,000-ton Choe Hyon-class destroyer launched sideways, losing its balance and falling over into the water in an embarrassing display caught on satellite imagery. This appears to be the first — or at least, first observed — such side launch of a ship. Side launches can indeed be rowdy; the US Navy has launched ships in this manner, and they do bob violently in the process. However, the US has never side launches a ship of this size, especially given how top-heavy warships tend to act compared to commonly side launched vessels like cargo or tankers. Also at issue is that North Korea appears to have pre-installed something like 70 weapons systems on top of the destroyer before it launched; that’s way more than typically installed on U.S. and South Korean vessels, which are invariably installed after launch.
Dasl Yoon, The Wall Street Journal
Sports
Sports’ consumption of broadcast television continues to advance as scripted entertainment continues to retreat from schedules. This September, just 36 scripted series will air on the Big Four networks, down 45 percent from 66 scripted series eight years ago. Ratings ain’t great — the 97 primetime entertainment series averaged 414,228 adults per episode live-plus-same-day in the 2024-25 season — 88 percent of the audience that does show up isn’t in the adults under 50 demographic, which is the one that advertisers value particularly highly. Sports, though, is where the action is: while still a minority of overall broadcast time, in 2024, sports accounted for $13.2 billion in spend, nipping at the heels of the $16 billion spent on television shows.
Toto
Toto, the Japanese toilet manufacturer, introduced the Washlet line of bidets in the 1980s, where it became not just a hit but a downright standard element of toilets in Japan to this day. Washlet-style bidets still account for 80 percent of all household toilets. It took 18 years to sell their first million Washlets, but sales picked up considerably as features became more extensive, and all-time sales now exceed 60 million devices. Toto is now trying to run that playbook in the United States, where just 2.5 percent of households have such a feature.
River Akira Davis and Kiuko Notoya, The New York Times
Asian Misrepresentation
A new analysis of 236 Asian main characters across 80 films released from 1982 to 2023 sought tot find out how often Hollywood cast a person of Asian descent as a character specifically from a different Asian country. For example, casting a Korean actor to play an explicitly Chinese character. All told, the industry actually did a little better than expected: out of the 80 movies, 64 of them actually cast Asian characters with complete accuracy, and another 13 of them with at least partial accuracy. Of the 236 Asian main characters, 88 percent were indeed portrayed by an actor of the same ethnic background. When the movie had an Asian director, that went up to 94 percent accuracy, compared to an 83 percent accuracy for non-Asian directors.
Dorothy Lu and Anna Li, The Pudding
Seahorses
A new study published in Conservation Biology analyzed 297 unique records detailing the seizure of smuggled seahorses, which were the first genus of marine fishes to be protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. Dried seahorses — mostly originating in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and usually bound for China, where they are consumed as part of traditional medicine — are commonly illegally trafficked, with analysis finding that the seizures accounted for 5 million dead seahorses from 2010 to 2021. The study estimates an average of 349,000 seahorses seized per year, which is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
University of British Columbia
X-Rays
Astronomers have found a cool guy, according to data out of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. They’ve detected some kind of celestial object 15,000 light-years away that emits X-rays and radio waves in a cycle lasting 44 minutes, but we’re not entirely sure what it is. It could be a highly magnetized dead star, or it could be something currently not known to exist. This is the first time that X-rays have been seen coming from a long-period radio transient, which is an object that cycles through radio signals over the course of many minutes. The object, affectionately nicknamed ASKAP J1832−091, had a hyperactive phase that lasted about a month, and then didn’t emit any X-rays.
Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press
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My daughter, the budding astrophysicist, will be very interested in the astronomy story!