Numlock News: November 20, 2025 • Proboscis, Kuiper Belt, Odditoriums

By Walt Hickey

One Day, More

Disney has sued Sling TV, which is owned by Dish, over the company offering one-day passes to ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3 and the Disney Channel for $4.99 a pop. This deal is appealing to the kind of customer who maybe didn’t want to pay for an entire cable package, but wanted to watch, say, a single game of interest. Disney thinks this practice imperils the whole arrangement and sued. The initial win goes to Sling, as a district court judge found that Disney was unable to produce evidence of fiscal harm as a result of the deal. Sling is now spiking the football as it were, dropping the price of a one-day pass to $3.99.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

America (2016)

Artist Maurizio Cattelan’s work America (2016) has been sold, with the working toilet made out of gold going for $10 million, or $12.1 million after fees. The work was consigned to Sotheby’s by Steve Cohen, the Mets-owning art collector who serves as a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art. Another edition of America was installed at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, but was stolen in 2019 and is believed to have been melted down for the valuable metal. The artistic institution that acquired the artwork is none other than the estimable gallery Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, which operates museums called “Odditoriums” with dozens of the glorified roadside attractions

Carlie Porterfield, The Art Newspaper

Proboscis

A researcher developing extremely fine nozzles to help 3D print incredibly fine structures has found a clever way to obtain a new level of precision for their instruments. The narrowest commercially available nozzle on the market is a costly $80 and has an interior bore of 35 micrometers. Attempts with glass pulling were promising, but ultimately resulted in brittle and expensive nozzles. The research then turned to nature and looked for a naturally occurring nozzle of the desired specifications, discovering the proboscis of a female Aedes aegypti mosquito could be used to print structures down to 20 micrometers. A worker can make six such nozzles per hour at a cost of less than a dollar each, and the nozzles can last for two weeks before 30 percent of them start to fail.

Matthew Sparkes, New Scientist

Scammed

Lots of Americans have been burned by online scams or attacks, with 73 percent saying that they had been the victim of at least one scam from a list of several. Nearly half of those surveyed — 48 percent — said that someone had made fraudulent charges on their credit card, 36 percent said that they had bought an item online that either never arrived or was clearly counterfeit, 29 percent had lost an online account to a hacker and 10 percent have suffered a full-on ransomware attack that had locked up their computer until they paid a fee.

Rebecca Leppert, Pew Research Center

Social Media

A new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open tracked 14,000 students in Australia aged 11 to 14 from the year 2019 to 2022. It found that the students underwent a drastic shift in how they spent their time. Over the period, the percentage who used social media daily increased from 26 percent to 85 percent. All that time has to come from somewhere, though, and the answer is ugly. The percentage of kids who never took part in artistic activities increased from 26 percent to 70 percent, the percentage who never read for fun increased from 11 percent to 53 percent and the percentage who never joined extracurricular music increased from 70 percent to 85 percent. The percentage who never used social media declined from 31 percent to just three percent.

University of South Australia

Air Purifiers

India is projected to be a massive market for home air purifiers as the country becomes wealthier and more urban, all while air pollution continues to rise. The market is projected to expand at a compound annual rate of 12.2 percent from 2026 to 2033, increasing from $151.5 million to $381.4 million over the period. With United States trade tensions causing problems for Chinese manufacturers of air purifiers, companies are eyeing India as a major future region of growth.

Quratulain Rehbar, Nikkei Asia

Kuiper

In 2011, researchers found a cluster of 189 objects on a similar orbit within the Kuiper belt — that region of icy rocks out past Neptune in the solar system. Located 44 astronomical units away from the sun, that cluster is called the “kernel” of the Kuiper belt. Researchers at Princeton have now found another, more compact cluster of objects they’re calling the “inner kernel.” This inner kernel was discovered through refining orbital data from 1650 Kuiper belt objects that were plugged into a clustering algorithm. The new cluster is located roughly 43 astronomical units from the sun. This is an exciting moment for research into the Kuiper belt, as the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory is expected to find oodles of objects out on the edge of the solar system.

Leah Crane, New Scientist

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