Numlock News: May 8, 2025 • Spores, Sports, Spirits

May 08, 2025

Rapport Spores

Researchers, wanting to see just how high up into the stratosphere fungal spores can climb, hitched a sampling device to five weather balloon flights that took off from Switzerland, and were able to find a bounty of mycology in the upper atmosphere. Based on DNA sequencing analysis, spores from 235 genera were found dozens of kilometers up in the atmosphere. They found fungi from Japan and the United States and were even able to revive and culture spores from 15 different species in a lab.

Elise Cutts, Science

Rocky Start

The Colorado Rockies are off to the kind of bad start in baseball that has historians kicking the tires on whether or not this is one of those history-making bad teams. As of midday yesterday, the Rockies were 6-28, putting them 17.5 games out of first place. There are certainly shades of last year’s Chicago White Sox — a team that began their season 3-22 and won 25.3 percent of their games, the worst showing in the modern era. The situation in Colorado is looking bad, with the worst hitters in the league and some of the worst defense. Only the 1988 Baltimore Orioles had a worse 34-game start, going 5-29. However, the worst ever single-season winning percentage belongs to the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics, who only won 23.5 percent of their games.

Joe Murphy and David K. Li, NBC News

Poached

The illegal wildlife trade often deliberately obscures the origin of the animals that pass through it, attempting to pass off wild-caught animals as captive-bred exotic pets. It’s very hard to prove that a bird midway through the exotic pet supply chain was illegally stolen from its natural habitat, but an exciting new technique can give enforcement a look back at the animal’s origin: stable isotope analysis. The technique measures the abundance of chemical elements in an animal’s tissues, specifically the feathers in birds. Because captive birds are raised on corn and sorghum while wild birds eat a more diverse set of fruits, nuts and seeds, different diets manifest in the chemistry of the feathers. Researchers have been able to distinguish between the feathers of wild-caught and captive galahs 90 percent of the time and have a 74 percent success rate among other parrot species.

Jude Coleman, bioGraphic

Afterlife

A global survey discovered which countries’ citizens are most and least likely to believe in things like life after death, that spirits can reside in animals and that other parts of nature — such as mountains or rivers — can host spirits as well. All told, the 35-country median was 62 percent when it came to animals having spirits, topped by India (83 percent) and Greece (82 percent), with Spain (36 percent) and Bangladesh (40 percent) at the bottom. Belief in nature spirits (56 percent the world over) was highest in Ghana (87 percent) and lowest in Israel (28 percent) and Poland (29 percent). Afterlife belief (64 percent worldwide) was highest in Indonesia (85 percent) and Turkey (84 percent) and lowest in Sweden (38 percent).

Jonathan Evans, Kirsten Lesage, William Miner, Kelsey Jo Starr and Manolo Corichi, Pew Research Center

Vendors

The New York City Council is considering a measure that would significantly increase the number of legal street vendors serving food in the city, adding over 1,000 new mobile food vendor permits. As it stands, New York has 7,000 mobile food vendor permits that last until someone dies or it’s rescinded, and they are all taken. There is a waiting list 10,000 individuals long, and while there are 445 new permits issued each year, an enterprising vendor is staring down a ten-year wait. The alternatives are either renting a permit through the underground market for somewhere around $25,000 for two years or just working outside the permitting structure. The four bills under consideration would ease those constraints, make it easier for someone to score a permit, and hopefully revive the once vibrant vendor scene in the city.

Andrea Strong, Eater

Podcasts

A new estimate from the research firm Owl & Co. puts the global sales of the podcast industry all the way up to $7.3 billion, which is double the previous most estimates for the size of the business. Ad sales in the United States alone were estimated to hit $2.4 billion, but Owl & Co.’s estimate goes further, including video revenue from platforms such as YouTube, an increasingly dominant platform for the medium. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we’re getting a bit philosophical here, so what’s the difference between a podcast and a “talk video” if we’re all of a sudden shooting high definition video of a once audio medium?

Lucas Shaw and Ashley Carman, Bloomberg

Gambling

The Philippines is the second-largest gambling hub in Asia and has undergone a substantial shift in the method of gambling since the spread of phone-based gambling. For the first time, revenue from people gambling on their phones exceeded the revenue from people gambling in casinos, which may be a glimpse of things to come for the rest of the world as many countries legalize the controversial practice of making gambling legal everywhere. Revenue for e-games and e-bingo was up 27 percent year over year and accounted for about half the 104.1 billion pesos (US$1.9 billion) extracted by the industry in the first quarter, while brick-and-mortar joints made up just 47.3 percent of the total.

Cliff Harvey Venzon, Bloomberg

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