Numlock News: October 5, 2026 • Paprika, Uranium, Haunted House

Oct 05, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Alderman Merriam’s Shells

A painting scored for $30 at an estate sale in Michigan has sold at auction for $1.3 million just a year later, with the authenticated Gertrude Abercrombie work setting a world record for the artist. The painting, Alderman Meriam’s Shells, was traded to a doctor by the artist in lieu of payment for surgical services, and while it had been exhibited at museums, the work just vanished into the doctor’s estate.

Eileen Kinsella, The Art Newspaper

Digger

Tom Cruise-starring and Alejandro González Iñárritu-directed Digger has bombed at the box office, with the $160 million to $180 million budgeted feature earning $7.5 million at the domestic box office. With American critics decidedly mixed on the film, the marketing played up how much European critics dug Digger; that didn’t work either, as the movie made a meek $12 million from 73 international markets. Verity, which is based on a hit book from Colleen Hoover and stars Anne Hathaway, won the weekend with $32.6 million.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Paprika

The signature spice of Hungarian cuisine is paprika, but domestic cultivation has been declining in Hungary for many years amid inconsistent weather and international competition. Red peppers slated for paprika were grown on 13,029 hectares in 1979 at the peak of domestic paprika cultivation, but as of 2024, it was down to just 1,410 hectares. Imports from China and South America are partly to blame for the smaller footprint, but labor shortages and the driest summers on record have pinched the Hungarian business even further.

Andras Rostovanyi, Agence France-Presse

Clam

Tridacna gigas, the giant clam, can live for over a century, and scientists have been able to assess clam shells, similarly to a tree’s rings, to fill in some blanks about the history of global temperatures. The most detailed temperature record histories are from the Northern Hemisphere, predominantly at high latitudes, and temperature records from tropical oceans in the Southern Hemisphere are vastly thinner. A giant clam shell found in the Jiigurru lagoon on the Great Barrier Reef was dated to between 1785 and1827, and a microscopic analysis found 10,900 daily growth lines, indicating the clam lived for 30 years. Powder samples from 784 tiny holes drilled into the sample were then analyzed for oxygen isotopes, which led to the finding that 225 years ago, temperatures were 0.6 to 0.9 degrees Celsius cooler than sea surface temperatures measured in the same lagoon from 1995 to 2015.

Bohao Dong, Amy Prendergast, and Sean Ulm, The Conversation

The Word Spooktacular Used To Mean Something In This Country

A new survey found that people have turned from the Old Ways and are simply not in the spirit of Halloween. Sure, some people will observe the more casual fall activities, with 47 percent saying they plan to watch a scary movie, and 43 percent will display Halloween decorations, but the holiday has been just so commercialized: 46 percent will consume pumpkin-flavored foods or drinks, as if that’s any kind of replacement for confronting the seasonal spectre of mortality or celebrating Samhain at a sylvan bonfire. A pathetically low 18 percent of respondents will play tricks on people, just 13 percent will go on a hayride and only 13 percent will visit a haunted house. Wouldst thou like to live deliciously? Evidently not.

Taylor Orth, YouGov

Roll Up

There are 32,000 auto mechanic businesses that have opened up in the United States since 2018, up 12 percent. Many are chains, many are mom-and-pops and some are mom-and-pops that still operate under one of those chains, in a somewhat unique arrangement that has generally defined the auto repair business. They’re riding two big trends: The first is that vehicles got expensive and so people are driving them longer before buying a replacement, and the second is that vehicles got complex, so there’s more that can go wrong with them. All told, spending on U.S. auto services is projected to grow from $211 billion this year to $280 billion by 2031.

Sharon Terlep, The Wall Street Journal

B8

Nazi Germany’s nuclear weapons program has been the subject of lots of historical analysis and speculation, and a new study analyzing surviving German uranium cubes along with a computer simulation of what they realistically could have done challenges the German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s claims of being close to a nuclear chain reaction that could have produced plutonium for use in bombs. B8 was the Nazi’s final nuclear experiment, where 664 uranium cubes were suspended in heavy water. Researchers who obtained two of those cubes were able to analyze their density to determine that they were not enriched uranium but rather natural uranium; plugging that into a model, B8 had a neutron multiplication factor of just 0.94, which is short of the 1.0 needed to make a self-sustaining reaction. Criticality would have required 3.1 tons of uranium and 3.5 tons of heavy water, considerably more than the 1.5 tons of each in B8, which would have exceeded all of Germany’s uranium cube inventory by 20 percent and its heavy water by 80 percent.

Richard Stone, 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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