Numlock News: May 4, 2026 • Snooker, Saffron, Piedmont Resistor

May 04, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Devil Works Hard

The Devil Wears Prada 2 has made $77 million domestically and then another $156.6 million abroad, good for a $233.6 million opening. The movie is in the fantasy genre and takes place in a magical world in which magazines are still lucrative. Besides Prada, the box office was mostly composed of the other three hits from this year — Michael, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Project Hail Mary — holding the next top places. A politically inscrutable animated version of Animal Farm from Angel Studios opened to a disappointing $3.3 million.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Snooker

Today, a champion will be crowned for world snooker at the Crucible Theater in the United Kingdom after a tournament that has seen 32 players narrow to just two. The sport — which resembles billiards, up to a point and was developed by British army officers in India in the 1870s — is indeed English, though the center of gravity has shifted decisively to Asia. Fewer than 20,000 people play snooker regularly in England, and television viewership of the World Championship is a quarter of what it was three decades ago; the sport has 350 million fans in East Asia, and China alone fielded 11 of the final 32 players at Sheffield this year. China is home to 300,000 snooker clubs, while the UK is down to around 700.

Andrew Dickson, Bloomberg

Magnetotelluric

After 20 years, the Magnetotelluric Array project has released its final map and model in Reviews of Geophysics; the results from this analysis of data from 1,800 temporary stations across the United States has spawned imitators around the world. One discovery of the research is a fragment of Pangaea underneath the Appalachian Mountains created 200 million years ago known as the Piedmont Resistor. The project was operated on the cheap — just $20 million, started as a side project of the U.S. Array and then eventually brought to the finish line by USGS. It will have implications for the preparation against solar storms as the Resistor amplifies threats to power grids, as well as, I must assume, future “Bioshock” games as a lost underground American continent called the Resistor is just too good to pass up on as a setting.

Paul Voosen, Science

Timmy

A humpback whale first spotted in March in the Baltic Sea has been rescued from certain death. Efforts to save the 26,000 pound whale, named Timmy, were elaborate, and after four failed attempts to coax Timmy into a water-filled barge, the fifth attempt finally worked. Humpback whales generally don’t go into the Baltic Sea, and when they do, they are often stranded and die due to their dismay upon realizing that there’s a Denmark in the way of their exit, and they can’t figure out how to exit through a busy shipping lane.

Jenny Gross, The New York Times

The Spice Must Flow

The blocking of the Strait of Hormuz has upended the global trade for saffron, a very expensive and important culinary spice. Iran produces over 90 percent of the world’s saffron in the fields of Khorasan, and traders in Kashmir have relied on Iranian imports to supplement supply, though now much of that spice is snarled in ports in the Persian Gulf. It coincides with a year in which Kashmir’s own crop has hit rock bottom, with poor weather conditions resulting in an autumn yield that is only 20 percent of its normal output. Kashmir is responsible for under 1 percent of global supply by volume, but it’s got the highest concentrations of crocin, the iconic saffron pigment; its crop tends to come in at 8.72 percent crocin concentration and thus command top prices, compared to the 6.82 percent concentration in the Iranian supply.

Kamran Yousuf, Foreign Policy

WNBA

The estimated valuation of the average WNBA team is now $427 million, up 59 percent year over year and up 345 percent compared to 2024, thanks to surging popularity, more valuable television deals that begin in 2026, a fresh CBA that guarantees labor peace for the foreseeable future and an on-court product that is commanding more interest than ever. All told, the 13 WNBA teams that played in 2025 are worth a collective $5.55 billion. The league also has the best value-to-revenue multiple in sports at 13.6x, narrowly beating the NBA’s 13.5x.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Agri-drone

The global market for agricultural drones is expected to reach $4.62 billion this year and rise to $9.65 billion by 2032. The drones solve an agricultural labor crunch and are used to spray pesticides and herbicides. The biggest player in the field globally is China’s DJI, which has an 85 percent market share in the U.S. and Europe; Chinese companies in general command 95 percent of this market. That said, recent bans in the United States are forcing buyers to look for new sources, and the Turkish manufacturer Baibars Mechatronics Aviation is aiming to capitalize, looking to triple sales to $100 million by 2029. It’s seen sales in Europe rise 60 percent year over year, and while its agricultural, firefighting, and logistics drones run about 25 percent more expensive than the comparable Chinese product, Turkey’s membership in NATO and stronger ties to Europe and the United States may give Baibars Mechatronics Aviation an edge.

Sinan Tavsan, Nikkei Asia

Correction: The film is Animal Farm, not Animal House.

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