Numlock News: October 7, 2026 • Kubrick, Makgeolli, Tropilaelaps

Oct 07, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Kubrick

A number of items from Stanley Kubrick’s personal archive will be auctioned off at Bonhams, with highlights of the sale expected to include the star child prop from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is projected to fetch up to £800,000. Another top item in the sale, which will take place in February, is the axe wielded by Jack Nicholson in The Shining, expected to sell for £30,000 to £50,000. Other objects include annotated scripts, one of which I can only assume specifically will inform us which of the theories from Room 237 was actually the right one, and costumes used in the Christmas classic, Eyes Wide Shut. Frankly, none of this feels like the right way to spend money honoring Stanley Kubrick; the right way is obviously to hire a guy to play Handel’s Sarabande on harpsichord while you and the boys rake up some progress and get chiaroscuro drunk by candlelight, Barry Lyndon-ing just as the director intended.

The Associated Press

Emmys

The Television Academy, which puts on the Emmy Awards that honor television, has announced a tactical retreat from the doomed delivery mechanism of television. Beginning in September 2027, the Emmys will not air; they will simply livestream on Prime Video, available in 240 countries for free. The deal is reportedly valued at $15 million per year, which is a big bump up from the $9.5 million annual fee paid on a rotating basis by the four television networks, ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, which not only aired the Emmys but, believe it or not, actually used to compete in them, crazy, I know!

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Makgeolli

Pretty much every society on Earth produced some kind of fermented juice that makes people more interesting at parties, but not every one gets to make it to the big time and get stocked at bars. Sometimes, though, a spirit makes the leap and goes from being a regional delight to an international staple. Soju, the clear distilled Korean spirit, has enjoyed such a run recently, topping $96.5 million in exports last year, as Korean cuisine becomes globally popular and Korean pop culture penetrates new markets. Now, the second banana Korean booze wants to take its shot, with the sour, fizzy, milky rice wine called makgeolli attempting to go wide. Exports are rising quickly but remain substantially lower than soju, up 19 percent from 2020 and hitting $14.8 million last year. One issue impeding the global ambition of breweries is that the live fermentation and microorganisms which make makgeolli so unique are not well-suited for an international industrial mass-produced alcoholic beverage.

Denny Thomas, Hyonhee Shin and Soobin Kim, Bloomberg

Barefoot

Fossil bones and footprints of hominids suggest that people in the past might have walked differently before the development of shoes, and a new study sought to figure out how a life spent walking barefoot may have developmental impacts on the human ankle. They did this by looking at the trabecular bone, the spongy inside part of the bones, which changes over the course of an individual’s life in response to the forces at work upon it. The researchers analyzed the talus bone of 56 modern (deceased) humans, most of whom were Americans who wore shoes, but a cohort of talus bones were sampled from 16 people who lived in societies where shoes were uncommon. The study found that the trabecular bone tissue toward the front of the ankle was dense in the shoeless set compared to the shoe wearers, who had a greater volume of trabecular bone overall.

Christa Lesté-Lasserre, New Scientist

Mites

The work of keeping out non-native species is important not only to protect the local animals, but also to prevent the pests that might hitch a ride on those animals from coming along. One example is an incident in July, 2025 when a crew on a cargo ship found that there was a swarm of bees on board a journey from India to New Jersey. Federal apiarists talked to the crewmembers and instructed them how to capture the hundreds of bees while they were still 6,667 miles from their destination. That turned out to be a crucial catch, because the giant honeybees (Apis dorsata) have still not managed to survive a journey to North America alive, but also the carcasses turned up Tropilaelaps, a mite that too has not yet hit North America. It is the scourge of bees and is considerably harder to control than the already devastating Varroa mite that killed 60 percent of domesticated bees from 2024 to 2025.

Emma Smith, bioGraphic

Comedy

In April, SiriusXM changed Channel 99 from Raw Comedy/Raw Dog to Maniscalco’s Comedy Radio, a move that has upset many comedians. The new network is helmed by Sebastian Maniscalco and has since shifted away from the previous format towards a hits-driven model. This has had significant financial repercussions, according to a comedy industry advocacy group. Overall radio plays on the network have stayed flat, but have consolidated to just a handful of very, very popular comedians; according to the report, the 812 comedians whose work appeared on Channel 99 in April dropped to 275 acts as of September. In March, 27.3 percent of plays went to the top 50 artists, while in September, that was up to 43.6 percent. That, critics of the format shift argue, has been negative for working comedians, for whom the $15 in royalties per play can be more meaningful compared to the stars (and in many cases, estates) that predominantly benefit under the newer format.

Kevin Dolak, The Hollywood Reporter

Archaeology

The largest cultural resources management company in the United States, Chronicle Heritage, has surprisingly announced it will shut down. Their 600 employees include a number of archaeologists and paleontologists who have been recalled from digs and projects. With over 20 offices and over $100 million in revenue, it was a unique firm that had rolled up a number of smaller companies whose primary business was conducting the legally required archaeological surveys and reviews that precede major developments, work that constitutes about 90 percent of archaeological research conducted in the United States annually.

Taylor Mitchell Brown, Science

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