Numlock News: November 26, 2025 • Spongiophyton, Babybel, Tigers

Nov 26, 2025

By Walt Hickey

We are off for Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving, so the next Numlock will be in your inbox on Monday! A happy holiday to all who celebrate and have a great weekend everyone else, deeply grateful for you reading.

Skyscraper

Johnathan Warren, the “Fan Man” of New York City (who was arrested by police after landing a lightweight fan-powered paraglider at Calvert Vaux Park after an alleged flight around New York that began with a parachute jump off the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge) has had his day in court. Police charged him with felony reckless endangerment, but eventually dropped it. The Fan Man pleaded to disorderly conduct and got sentenced to four days of community service. The pilot now hopes that the NYPD will return his $12,000 flying equipment, which he claims to have used no fewer than 30 times between New York and New Jersey. Listen, call me old-fashioned, but I think it should absolutely be legal to fly a device that is a testament to man’s hubris in a city known as a monument to man’s hubris. Furthermore, it will be a cold day in hell when an inventor with an elaborate flying gizmo can’t gallivant through the skies of New Amsterdam.

Ramsey Khalifeh, Gothamist

Babybel

Babybel, which makes those wax-covered cheese bites, is replacing the plastic wrapper around the cheese with paper overwraps. This process has been in transition for five years and will ultimately save 850 tons of plastic and 2,500 tons of carbon dioxide annually, and every market will get the paper packaging by 2027. The pace at which the company produces cheese bites is remarkable; one of their two factories in France produces 10 million cheese bites daily, and the machine responsible wraps 14 mini Babybels per minute.

Katie Pyzyk, Food Dive

Tigers

Global trafficking of tigers has hit a troubling rate, with authorities seizing an average of nine tigers every month for the past five years. A century ago, there were about 100,000 wild tigers around the world, but today that figure is down to anywhere from 3,700 to 5,500. Trafficking has accelerated, with evidence that captive breeding operations may also be fueling the illicit trade in big cats. From 2000 to 2025, law enforcement recorded 2,551 seizures involving at least 3,808 tigers, and the period from 2020 to June 2025 alone involved the confiscation of 573 tigers.

Eileen Ng, The Associated Press

Oaks

Herbicide drift is when weed killers sprayed on crops spread into other areas, which can often be damaging to local plant and wildlife populations. An analysis of 280 sites across Illinois and the surrounding area found that 53 plant species have shown herbicide exposure symptoms, including a number of wild oaks that are particularly precious given their increasing rarity. A 2024 Prairie Rivers Network analysis found 99.6 percent of test sites showed signs of herbicide drift, and 90 percent of tree tissue samples contained herbicides. These results were confirmed by another analysis of 78,000 plants from 200 sites conducted by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Over 45 million kilograms of synthetic pesticides are sprayed in the Midwest annually.

Christian Elliott, bioGraphic

Cryptozoology

A new survey found that 28 percent of Americans believe that Bigfoot definitely or probably exists, though only 23 percent believe that the Yeti exists and just 16 percent believe that the Chupacabra exists. Furthermore, 22 percent believe that the Loch Ness monster is real. This result is somewhat peculiar — the gap between Bigfoot belief and Yeti belief is mildly vexing, given, you know, the sheer size of the potential range of a Himalayan Sasquatch versus the dwindling old-growth American forests that could potentially support an American variety. Also, that’s a pretty big number in favor of the Loch Ness monster, an impressive feat with the overwhelmingly scant documentary evidence and the infamously small habitat for the beast. Still, despite our many differences, there’s a lot we can agree on; after all, 56 percent of respondents said that aliens definitely or probably exist.

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

Grains

The development of agriculture appears to be necessary but not sufficient for the emergence of large civilizations. The first evidence of agriculture popped up around 9,000 years ago, and was invented at least 11 different times on four continents. However, large-scale societies didn’t immediately just pop up thereafter; they developed 4,000 years later. A new analysis of anthropological data on hundreds of pre-industrial societies argues that it was a very specific type of agriculture that prompted societies to organize into complex civilizations, specifically the cultivation of cereal grains like wheat, barley, rice and maize. The argument goes that those crops are particularly easy to measure and therefore tax, which would lead to the resources necessary to support an administrative state. Writing was uncommon in societies without a tax system, but very common in those that had one. Once states formed, they were more likely to remain on cereal crops thereafter.

Chris Simms, New Scientist

Plants

A new study published in Science Advances settles a major question in paleontology and places the emergence of lichens before the emergence of vascular plants. It furthermore argues that lichens were probably crucial in preparing the world for the eventual explosion in plant life. The fossil Spongiophyton had long been a mystery because its soft body tissue isn’t especially well-preserved through fossilization. It wasn’t clear whether it was an algae or a lichen, the latter of which is a symbiotic fungus-algae lifeform that can turn rocks and sediments into soil. Research into the chemical composition of Spongiophyton fossils found levels of nitrogen that would be consistent with chitin, which is found in fungi. This indicated that the very first vascular plants emerged 420 million years ago, that the lichen evolved 410 million years ago and that the emergence of that lichen to act on rocks and sediments was a major reason that forests were able to emerge 390 million years ago.

Taylor Mitchell Brown, Scientific American

Really fun Sunday edition this weekend talking to Philip Bump of the newly independent newsletter How To Read This Chart, check out his newsletter here.

Numlock Sunday: How To Read This Chart with Philip Bump

Walter Hickey

Nov 23

Numlock Sunday: How To Read This Chart with Philip Bump

Bump departed the Washington Post earlier this year and relaunched the project independently, exactly the kind of bold leap for a data journalism newsletter that we have a lot of particular affection for here at Numlock.

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