Numlock News: October 16, 2025 • Bayeux Tapestry, Chicago Rat Hole, Three-Spined Stickleback

Oct 16, 2025

Scams

Scam texts have become an enormously lucrative industry, with criminal organizations operating out of China reaping over $1 billion in the past three years. The volume of scam messages claiming that the recipient has a past-due toll payment is 3.5 times higher than it was in January 2024; Americans reported getting 330,000 such toll scam messages in a single day, according to Proofpoint. The “innovation” behind the scam is a new trick allowing criminals to take a stolen card number volunteered by a mark, attach that to a Google or Apple Wallet in Asia, then share it with co-conspirators in the U.S. to make purchases.

Robert McMillan, The Wall Street Journal

Heat

A new study found that the three-spined stickleback, a species of fish the size of a paperclip living in the temperate northern waters of Germany, was able to develop a resilience to extreme heat under laboratory conditions. Furthermore, the offspring of those fish also showed some of that resilience. The researchers took 285 wild specimens and put a control group in a tank that modeled the temperature variations of their general environment. They then put a second group in a tank that endured a 14-day extreme heatwave, and finally a third group in a tank that endured successive heatwaves — first a minor one, then a major one. Researchers found that the double heatwave group was more primed to survive the second, more severe heat stress after being hit with the first one. The heatwave fish did lay fewer eggs overall, but their offspring grew quickly and would go on to lay more eggs than the control group.

Ashley Braun, bioGraphic

Speed

Forcing cars in metropolitan areas to go slower has profound effects on public health, but a new study argues that simply changing the speed limit might not be the most effective way to attain those improvements. The push for lower speed limits came from research that discovered a 37 percent decrease in fatalities when Milan pushed a 30-kilometer-per-hour speed limit in the city. The limit only added about 34 seconds per trip to motorists. However, a new study analyzing data out of Milan, Amsterdam and Dubai — 73 million telemetry points and 1.2 million street-level images — found that speed limits are not especially effective at reining in speed, finding that drivers only slowed 2 to 3 km/h when the limits dropped from 50 to 30 km/h. What really did the trick was narrowing the streets, which appeared more effectively coerce drivers to dial it back.

Carlo Ratti, Bloomberg

Cosmic Crisp

Honeycrisp apples are delicious, juicy, savory and a gigantic pain to grow and ship and distribute. Previous popular varieties of apples were specifically bred to thrive in the rough-and-tumble agricultural supply chain, with taste coming in a distant second. That’s not the case for Honeycrisps. As a result, the price of a Honeycrisp has shot up to about $70 per carton tray of apples, well above the $25 to $35 band that most varieties end up on. They have to be hand-clipped from the trees — cutting down productivity — and they have a poor shelf life compared to hardier rivals. That being said, there is help on the horizon: the Cosmic Crisp, which has seen production increase 800 percent over the past year alone. It is a more durable cousin produced by crossbreeding the Honeycrisp and the Enterprise apple.

Amira McKee, The Wall Street Journal

Lights

Lighting fishing nets has been demonstrated in the past to reduce bycatch of sea turtles and sharks, but it’s faced impediments to implementation: the lights are heavy, fishers find them annoying and the batteries don’t last long enough. However, a new study out of Arizona State University developed solar-powered lights that function as buoys, the same to the usual buoys attached to fishing net float lines. They were able to stay active for five days without sunlight and flashed LEDs, and it worked. Sea turtle catch rates were 63 percent lower in the solar-powered illuminated nets compared to the control nets. The fishing boats with the solar nets even caught more of the desired yellowtail, too.

Arizona State University

Bayeux

The British Museum is getting the Bayeux Tapestry from France on a loan while the Bayeux Tapestry Museum is under renovation, and the expectations for attendance are massive. The tapestry will be on display in London from September 2026 to July 2027, and the museum is preparing for historic interest on par with the 1.7 million visitors who went to Treasures of Tutankhamun in 1972 or the 850,000 who went to The First Emporer: China’s Terracotta Army in 2007. The tapestry has some challenges associated with it. Not only will it have to be displayed at a 60-degree angle rather than hung vertically, but light levels must be kept low. It has also got 24,204 stains, 16,445 wrinkles, 9,646 gaps and 30 non-stabilized tears. The hope is to display it in a single line rather than a U-shape, which will allow readers to enjoy what is effectively the most famous British comic book in what is effectively the most famous British crowd formation, a 25-minute queue.

Martin Bailey, The Art Newspaper

Rat Hole

Moving on to American art, scientists can report that the beloved Chicago “rat hole” — a depression made in wet concrete decades ago by an unlucky rodent, forming an uncanny void in a Chicago sidewalk — was nearly certainly formed by a squirrel, not a rat. The original origin of the rat hole was thought to be a dead brown rat dropped by a bird of prey, but a new analysis of the site compared the iconic attraction to 50 museum specimens of the eight rodent species of Chicago. It found that there’s a 98.67 percent chance it was a squirrel, indeed one that likely fell from a tree.

Celina Zhao, Science

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