Numlock News: November 12, 2025 • Asteroid, Ponzi, Static

Nov 12, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Ponzi

Qian Zhimin pleaded guilty to two charges of money laundering in September after British police seized over 61,000 bitcoin (worth more than US$6 billion) in one of the largest seizures of cryptocurrency. This hoard of digital dough was obtained in the traditional manner: a sprawling Ponzi scheme that conned 128,000 investors. Prosecutors stunned the jury by pointing out that Zhimin and her co-conspirators spent over 95 million yuan (US$13.34 million) on jewelry as part of the fraud. However, I gotta weigh in here and observe that $13 million is a downright reasonable amount of money, all things considered, out of a six billion dollar ponzi scheme, right? Spending 0.2 percent of the proceeds is remarkably reasonable for a management fee in any sort of financial services, let alone an off-the-books investment racket, no?

Sam Tobin, Reuters

Stand Sit

A new study published in Applied Ergonomics focused on people with recent lower back pain who worked in a sedentary work environment found that a ratio of 30 minutes sitting followed by 15 minutes of standing was ideal to reduce stress and encourage regular movements throughout the day. Participants found it easy to follow and adhere to the routine more consistently than those who were on a self-prescribed ratio. My own studies contrast this workflow with the previous gold standard of “sit until I realize that my posture in front of the computer resembles few but Ötzi the Iceman, at which point I walk around while my joints make strange sounds” find it far more suitable.

Monique Mita, Griffith University

Turbines

The expensive part of wind turbines tends to be the whole installing them bit. The bigger they can be and the fewer they can number (while still generating the desired amount of power), the more drastically they can reduce construction costs. We see this phenomenon in China when the government stopped subsidizing offshore wind in 2022 and developers had to hone in on minimizing transportation and installation costs. The largest wind turbine is currently being tested off the coast of China and can generate 26 megawatts of energy; it’s a behemoth with a 155-meter blade radius. But even that will be beaten by a proposed 50-megawatt twin-headed turbine that has two different 145-meter blade turbines situated 585 meters apart. That is a supersized version of the first such twin-headed turbine, a 16 megawatt version currently operational in the South China Sea.

You Xiaoying, Scientific American

Podcasters

A new analysis of the 167 hosts of the 100 most popular podcasts and a further 1,018 hosts of the 592 most popular podcasts found that men outnumbered women around two-to-one behind the mic. Only 33.2 percent of the larger sample of hosts are women. That male-to-female ratio was 12-to-1 in business and technology, 4.3-to-1 in sports and fitness and 3.2-to-1 in comedy. Only true crime podcasts skewed female. Additionally, 27.2 percent of podcast guests were women, and just 37.4 percent of all podcasts had at least one guest who was a woman.

Stacy L. Smith, Katherine Pieper, Ariana Case, Sam Wheeler and Zoe Moore, Annenberg Inclusion Initiative

Static

A team of researchers found that static electricity can be used to remove frost from a surface, a finding that could save energy and millions of tonnes of antifreeze. This new defrosting system uses a high-voltage copper electrode suspended above frost-covered glass or copper. It can remove half the frost from a surface in 10 to 15 minutes when the electrode is charged to 550 volts; that’s double the voltage supplied by mains electricity in most of the world. However, given the very small current, the strategy is still safe, relatively speaking.

Alex Wilkins, New Scientist

Cosmetics

“Can we convince men to wear makeup?” has been the question understandably plaguing the modern cosmetics industry for years. After all, if half the population is just sitting right there, money in their pocket, but never buying your product. That fact is a bit demoralizing to the supposedly near-infinite powers of advertising. Generally, the answer to that question has been “broadly, no.” However, the cosmetics industry has still managed a few wins here and there; they’re all pretty proud of the decades of work it took to convince half of men to occasionally wash their faces. According to Mintel, the percentage of men surveyed who used a skin-care product rose to 52 percent in 2024. That number is up from 31 percent in 2022, a real feather in the cap of the $20 billion industry, even if that does count stuff like acne treatments and beard care. Young men experimenting with daring beauty concepts such as “wearing sunscreen” and “honestly, it’s mostly just wearing sunscreen, but we’re taking the win” have made the 18- to 27-year-old cohort a key driver of men’s cosmetics.

Joshua Hunt, Bloomberg

Asteroid

The asteroid 2024 YR4 was briefly a point of concern for a collision with Earth, but after further analysis from NASA, that fate has basically been ruled out. It might still strike the Moon, though, and that could be a pickle given how much stuff we keep in orbit these days. At this moment, the asteroid has a four percent chance of hitting the moon in 2032. The James Webb Space Telescope will have an opportunity to observe 2024 YR4 in two brief viewing windows on February 18 and 26, 2026. That’s a crucial moment, as the next chance of observation won’t be until 2028. The data collected next February will ultimately decide whether it’s worth it to attempt some kind of deflection mission. Based on the data collected in February, there’s an 80 percent chance that the likelihood of a lunar collision drops below one percent. However, there is also a 5 percent chance of an increase to over 30 percent.

Alex Wilkins, New Scientist

If you subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! It’s fun, and supporters keep this thing ad-free. This is the best way to support something you like to read:

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture · Romeo vs. Juliet · Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics ·