Numlock News: October 1, 2025 • The Illusionist, Neurospora, Albedo

Oct 01, 2025

Butter But Better

Premium butter sales are growing fast; sales of butter priced at 25 percent or more expensive than the average price are up 24.2 percent year over year. Super premium butter (at least 75 percent more than average) is up 13.7 percent, and mainstream butter sales are up a mere 1.1 percent. The butters are winning devoted fans. At the same time that consumers have been trading down in some parts of the grocery store, butter has remained a bit of an exception since the pandemic, when a surge in cooking turned a lot of people on to the good stuff. While the average price of a pound of butter is $4.36, premium brands like Kerrygold can charge $10.99 per pound, Les Prés Salés can fetch $24.38 per pound and Maison Bordier can go for $43.54 per pound. I consider myself as much of a gourmand as the next guy, but at that price point, certainly any improvement in taste has to be only margarine-al.

Kristina Peterson, Bloomberg

EWR

The three New York City area airports tend to rotate which one is considered The Bad One. Ever since they renovated LaGuardia to make it look like it was in Dubai, the bottom of the pile has been Newark Liberty International Airport, which is juggling a host of problems — logistical and otherwise. The key issue for Newark is staffing shortages in air traffic control, which is generally considered a rather important part of successfully operating an airport. The latest FAA order caps the number of flights out of Newark to 72 per hour, well under the 80 or more allowed prior to May, but still a bit above the 68 flights per hour it was capped at earlier this year.

David Shepardson and Jasper Ward, Reuters

This Way

A new study published in Nature Communications described people re-entering the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula 12,000 years ago. The Arabian Peninsula was abandoned by humans about 25,000 years ago when climate changes made the area even drier than it is today. However, researchers are making new findings based on the discovery of camel engravings carved into sandstone cliff faces. The archaeologists believe these carvings are evidence of signposts pointing to seasonal lakes. The research is based on 60 new panels of animal art discovered in 2023 in the Nefud. That brings the total to 176 engravings, including 90 camels, 17 ibex, 15 horses, 7 gazelle and an aurochs, all of which have the commonality that they need lots of water to remain alive. Previously, the art was believed to be from 5600 to 5100 BCE.

Taylor Mitchell Brown, Science

Fermentation

Using microbes to ferment food and make it edible or tasty is one of the oldest ways that people have been preparing food, with some of the earliest known deliberate fermentation — to produce bread — occurring in Jordan 14,000 years ago. That said, scientists are still finding out new and exciting ways to utilize fermentation to prepare food. They are making steps to advance the long-time use of fermentation, making food that would otherwise be discarded or go to waste into palatable comestibles. Scientists have been able to map all the manners of fermentation — from fish sauce to brie, from gochujang to coffee, from salami to tequila — to find promising areas of exploration, new manners of making miso and possible microbes to pair up with heretofore unfermented food. One study took the mold Neurospora intermedia, which ferments a tempeh-like food from Java, and found that when it was cultured on 30 different types of food waste and byproducts, it grew well on all but three of them. The research into fermentation has been especially sporeful in the field of non-dairy cheese.

Graham Lawton, New Scientist

The Illusionist

A new analysis from Ampere Analytics found that 39 percent of all the 67,000 television seasons and 172,000 movies on U.S. streaming platforms appear on two or more streaming services. It is a sign that the platform exclusivity that defined lots of the early days of the streaming wars has given way to stuff appearing on multiple platforms, some ad-supported and others free. Fully 21 percent of those movies and seasons were simultaneously available on no fewer than three different video on demand services, much higher than the nine percent figure in 2020. This has led to some interesting effects, such as 35 percent of Peacock’s library also appearing on Prime Video. The most widely available show is Heartland, available on 13 different services. The most widely available film is 2006’s The Illusionist, available on 12 different platforms.

Tony Maglio, The Hollywood Reporter

Albedo

The Earth got darker from 2001 to 2024, according to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, mostly owing to changes in the northern hemisphere. The average solar energy intake on Earth is 240 to 243 watts per square meter. However, the study found a divergence of 0.34 watts per square meter per decade, which is not a whole lot, certainly, but was statistically significant and interesting. The study suggests that the decrease in sea ice concentration in the northern hemisphere — ice reflects solar radiation better than rock or water — contributed to the darkening.

Tribune Content Agency

Ripple

The European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope has managed to map the warp of the Milky Way disk and map out the wobbles in the galaxy. The data from the telescope has revealed that a wave is rippling through the galaxy outwards, and one side of the galaxy is currently warping upwards while the other side is warping downwards. The wave covers a huge part of the galactic disk and affects stars 30,000 to 65,000 light-years away from the galactic center.

European Space Agency

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