Numlock News: November 5, 2026 • Eridani, Champlain, Swift

Nov 05, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Anime

The annual report from the Association of Japanese Animations puts the overseas market for anime at 2.54 trillion yen (US$16.1 billion), which is now considerably larger than the Japanese domestic market for anime of 1.91 trillion yen (US$12.1 billion). The international market first passed the domestic market in 2020, and since 2023, the global business has pulled up and away compared to the more modest growth of domestic sales. However, there’s a somewhat crucial problem here for the actual studios and animation houses responsible for the anime, and it comes down to a preference for licensing the content out rather than cutting distribution deals that are more favorable: Because of the existing structure, only 5.5 percent of overseas anime sales trickle down to Japanese studios, which is vastly lower than the games industry (92 percent) or film industry (22 percent).

Richardson Handjaja, Animenomics

Harley

While sales volume for Harley-Davidson is down to 132,535 motorcycles last year, down from the sales peak of 344,000 bikes in 2006, the company has managed to face unfavorable demographic and economic headwinds relatively well. Despite an aging fandom and the kind of interest rates and gas prices that make one reconsider spending $46,000 on a bike, globally, sales are up four percent so far this year. With new models designed for the European market, as well as three-wheeled “trikes” that are squarely aimed at the affluent but older Harley-Davidson faithful that perhaps has lost a bit too much dexterity to manage a two-wheeled motorcycle, Harley has defied expectations.

John Keilman, The Wall Street Journal

Swift

Successful scientific careers end in lots of different ways — a gold watch and a pleasant retirement here, a quit-and-go-corporate there, an “emeritus” adjective there — but it’s rare that it ends with an accomplished contributor vaporizing in the atmosphere over North Sumatra after a botched rescue attempt. And yet, that is exactly what happened to the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory yesterday. After a 22-year career scanning the sky for gamma-ray bursts, the satellite succumbed to the inevitability of gravity. Swift’s orbit declined from 600 kilometers in 2004 to 370 this year; NASA commissioned a rescue attempt to try to save it by giving it a boost, but the rescue failed in August. Swift generated 7,000 papers, detected 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and spotted 1,400 supernovae, so in one sense, it died as it lived: proving that there are remarkable explosions in the sky if you know where to look.

Daniel Clery, Science

Tungsten

In 2025, the world mined 85,000 metric tons of tungsten, with the overwhelming majority of that — 79 percent of global tungsten production — coming from China. Export controls surrounding the crucial metal have caused challenges for all sorts of production chains, and the ones having a particularly difficult supply crunch are companies that produce micro drill bits for use in chip manufacturing. These are specialized tools that resemble needles but are made out of strong tungsten carbide, drilling micro-holes in circuit boards and chip substrates that allow connections across multiple layers. As chip substrates have become more complex, demand for the tungsten bits has surged from producers like Sumitomo Electric, Kyocera and Mitsubishi Materials, but they’re all having trouble getting their hands on tungsten. Prices for ammonium paratungstate from China rose from 212,750 yuan (US$31,900) per metric ton in February to 530,000 yuan as of this week, and prices outside of China are three times the cost of the Chinese stuff.

Cheng Ting-Fang, Nikkei Asia

Champlain

Lake Champlain, which straddles New York and Vermont and heads up into Quebec, supplies drinking water to 200,000 people. For the past several decades, though, phosphate pollution has fueled explosive blooms of the often toxic cyanobacteria known as blue-green algae, which choke the ecosystem and threaten water supplies. Vermont is responsible for two-thirds of the phosphorus that flows into the lake, mostly from agriculture, but stormwater runoff exacerbates the issue. A decade ago, Vermont state leaders set out a 20-year plan that, by 2036, would tighten up cleanup targets to keep phosphate pollution out of the lake. Halfway in, a billion dollars spent, and having only targeted the low-hanging fruit, Vermont is just 35 percent of the way to the goal.

Jonathan Mingle, Seven Days

Bantu

About 350 million people across sub-Saharan Africa speak one of the approximately 500 Bantu languages, and new research indicates that may be the result of a sustained migration across the continent by a single community that occurred starting 6,000 to 4,000 years ago, rather than just the spread of a tongue. A 2009 genetic study has found that Bantu-speaking people from western, central and southern Africa were more closely related than expected given the relative distance. A 2024 genomic analysis of 1,763 Africans found the greatest genetic diversity among Bantu speakers in western Africa and a decline in diversity the further you got; this kind of finding is consistent with a population on the move from one place to another. The current theory is that a group of Bantu-speaking people from north of the Congo rainforest crossed the forest and reached the southern fringes 2,500 to 3,500 years ago, at which point they split into an east-moving and a south-moving group.

Katarina Zimmer, Knowable Magazine

Amaze, Amaze, Amaze

A new technique described in a new paper in Nature has increased the sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope as much as 15 times in one test, which has proven especially useful when trying to observe exoplanets. Most of the over 6,000 known exoplanets have been discovered indirectly by watching a star go dim for a bit or when a star moves it’s orbiting, which has limited us to mainly giant planets imaged when they’re young and still hot from formation. This new technique for using JWST’s optics has managed to capture a previously known exoplanet, 51 Eridani b, at a wavelength of light (4.3 micrometers) that it had not been detected before. The team will now look again at all the coronagraphic images from JWST so far to see if this newly calibrated technique can spot planets that had previously been missed.

Daniel Clery, Science

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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