Numlock News: October 14, 2025 • Rum, Gold, Secret Keys

Oct 14, 2025

Gold

The price of gold is now north of $4,000 an ounce, which is leading people into some once dead career trajectories, including prospector, assayer and old coot. While most of the rivers of the United States were thoroughly and aggressively panned during the various gold rushes that have defined the business cycle of American mining, some people have been lured back into these rivers by the sky-high price of the metal. The Big Thunder Gold Mine, which dates back to the 1874 Black Hills Gold Rush, offers panning lessons and sells five-gallon buckets of dirt collected on site for $55 each; sales are up 50 percent year over year. The real motherlode is not in the rivers, of course, but in the streams, as people are making a lot of money from posting about their foolish gold-finding quests for rather substantial and lucrative audiences. One prospecting influencer family has racked up 430,000 followers and earned $30,000 from the social media business, vastly more than they’ve pulled out of any riverbed.

Te-Ping Chen, The Wall Street Journal

Rum Fish

In 1907, the U.S. Fish Commission’s USS Albatross ventured from San Francisco to the Philippines and collected 79,000 specimens of fish in the bays and reefs of the island nation over the next three years, documenting 117 new species in the process. The ship was the first one built purposefully for research and preserved the fish collected in high-proof rum. It was a stroke of luck for researchers because the formaldehyde ordinarily used in the era damages DNA, but rum does not — a fact that I am going to tell everyone on my next beach vacation. Now, a team of researchers is analyzing DNA samples from the historic specimens collected by the Albatross, and has found that the genetic diversity of three studied species has actually declined by four to six percent, well outpacing the baseline two percent genetic diversity loss across 140 species of fish found in a 2014 meta-analysis.

Erik Stokstad, Science

Volcanos

A new study in Communications Earth & Environment demonstrates a strategy that allows researchers to determine the exact position of magma or gas within a volcano’s conduits in three dimensions. This may help forecast volcanic eruptions long-term. Magma rising through the crust toward a volcano can cause tremors as the high pressure fractures rocks and gases escaping from magma. The researchers’ analysis of the Oldoinyo Lengai volcano in Tanzania over the course of 18 months led to the discovery of two different kinds of tremor, one which originated five kilometers down and one near the base of the volcano. That particular volcano is interesting because the magma there is relatively cool — 550 degrees Celsius, well under the typical 650 to 1,200 degrees Celsius that is typical — and is more fluid.

Kathrin Voigt, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Quantum

The cryptography world has been steadily preparing for a reality in which useful quantum computers actually exist, a technological advance that would make computing significantly more efficient. However, in doing so, it also makes existing cryptographic standards obsolete and easily overcome by the new equipment. As it stands, less than half of TLS connections made within Cloudflare’s network and 18 percent of Fortune 500 networks support quantum-resistant connections, but one group — the engineers behind the Signal Protocol, which powers end-to-end encryption for many chat apps — has been working to make their encryption fully quantum-resistant. The latest upgrade adds the ML-KEM-768 implementation of the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm, or KEM, which involved overcoming a fascinating technical challenge of adding a 1,000-byte key to each message without running into bandwidth problems. It is a vastly larger key than the 32-byte current implementation.

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica

Hunts

A new study published in the journal Antiquity pored over satellite imagery of the Andean highlands of Chile, discovering dozens of once-rarely spotted traps that Andean hunters used to capture animals. These are large structures built by hunter-gatherers who constructed stone walls that slowly converged and funneled pursued animals into a pit trap. Prior to this study, there were fewer than a dozen such traps known across the pre-Hispanic Andes. However, analyzing 4,600 square kilometers of imagery turned up 76 new examples of the chacu traps, in addition to 800 previously undiscovered small-scale settlements and at least 100 more traps further to the south of the Camarones Valley. The average length of the long wall in the traps was 181 meters, the shorter arm was 97 meters and the landscape was occupied from at least 6000 BC to 1700 AD.

Garry Shaw, The Art Newspaper

Burst

In July, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope spotted a gamma-ray burst 9 billion light-years from Earth called GRB 250702B. Most bursts last only a couple of minutes, but GRB 250702B was a monster, lasting 25,000 seconds (roughly 7 hours) and becoming the longest-known gamma-ray burst ever spotted. What the heck caused it is still in question; most long gamma-ray bursts are the result of a star collapsing into a black hole and launching out a jet in its death throes. The theory for GRB 250702B is that a pre-existing black hole made contact with a companion star and consumed it from the inside out, producing an ultra-long blast such as this one.

Jonathan O’Callaghan, New Scientist

VinFast

Vietnamese automaker VinFast reported selling 103,884 electric cars in the first nine months of the year in Vietnam, which is already outpacing what Toyota sells in the same country in an entire year. Last year, VinFast sold 87,000 EVs in the entire year, beating Toyota’s 66,578 predominantly internal combustion engine vehicles. Last year, 28 percent of sales were to Green and Smart Mobility, which is a taxi company under the Vingroup corporate umbrella, but it’s not clear how much of their 2025 sales were to the corporate cousin. VinFast appears to now be responsible for half of all cars sold in Vietnam; the latest data shows that 205,125 autos rolled off the lot in the first nine months, including trucks and buses.

Lien Hoang, Nikkei Asia

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