Numlock News: October 9, 2025 • Supernova, Shipwreck, The Life of a Showgirl

Oct 09, 2025

Anything Goes

In August 2020, the ship Gulf Livestock 1 (en route to Tangshan, China) sank after electing to contend with a Category 4 typhoon rather than hunker down and wait it out. The Gulf’s unique cargo of 5,867 dairy cattle was on the ship captain’s mind when making that call, as each day at anchor would increase the risk of death or disease. The sinking is the worst-ever disaster in the live export trade — a small fraction of the global shipping industry, with about 150 ships serving an (arguably under-regulated) market valued at $20 billion to $30 billion. The two countries with the most at stake in the business are Australia, which was the top exporter with 2.4 million animals exported abroad in 2019, and China, which was the top importer until recently, taking in 250,000 live cattle in 2020. The ships aren’t great: the average age of a general cargo ship on the sea is 20 years old, the average livestock carrier is 36 and 80 percent of them weren’t initially built to transport animals.

Andrew S Lewis, Bloomberg

Ophelia

The Life of a Showgirl, the latest Taylor Swift album, has achieved the record for the biggest launch of an album in the streaming era, surpassing the previous benchmark set by Adele’s 25. The album sold 3.2 million copies and racked up another 300,000 album equivalent units of streaming in its opening week for a final tally of 3.5 million AEUs. There is still another day, but so far it does not appear that Swift has managed to pry the record for best individual album sales (not including streamed album equivalents) held still by Adele, with 3.3 million straight-up album sales of 25 in 2015.

Ethan Millman, The Hollywood Reporter

Boluses

A new study of Antarctic krill in the Southern Ocean has found that not only are the krill doing a great job of sequestering carbon by eating it and then sinking it to the depths by excreting it, but they are also keeping carbon locked away through food boluses. These are essentially masses of rejected food that sink to the depths to be sequestered indefinitely. The filter feeders have to clear themselves of indigestible carbon-rich plankton, and thus the bolus forms. The key finding is that the boluses sink way faster than krill poop, sinking at an average speed of 367 meters per day, much faster than the 269 meters per day of krill fecal pellets.

Paul Arnold, Phys.org

Wallaby Way

A new study out of the University of Sydney analyzed data from four large online aquarium retailers and found that of 734 fish species available for sale, 655 species were only sourced through capturing animals from the wild. Only 21 species were exclusively available through aquaculture. Many of those caught fish are obtained from tropical reefs, including clownfish, wrasses and gobies. There were 45 species available for purchase that were of conservation concern — including 25 with declining population trends — and of those 45 species, 38 were obtained only from the wild. In a somewhat positive sign, though, the aquaculture fish were 28.1 percent cheaper than the wild-caught ones.

University of Sydney

Pyrrhic Victories

A new analysis of 14 million home sales in 30 states over the course of two decades found that buyers often overpaid and were likelier to default in sales where the buyer seemingly had to win a bidding war to obtain the property. The study compared situations where the buyers paid more than asking, which the economists said was a reliable sign that there was a bidding war involved. The homebuyers who won bidding wars saw annual returns 1.3 percentage points lower than those who didn’t, and given that the typical homeowner held the property for 6.3 years, that translated to an 8.2 percent overpayment. Furthering the winners’ curse is the additional 1.9 percentage points more likely to default.

Soon Hyeok Choi, The Conversation

Clean Burn

The stars that formed right after the Big Bang are thought to have been mostly hydrogen and helium with a dash of lithium here or there. Eventually, metals and other heavy elements were forged in the hearts of these stars through nuclear fusion. Those stars eventually went supernova, ejecting a mixture of those elements in a process that was repeated through a number of stellar generations. As a result, stars these days often contain lots of heavy elements and metals in addition to the hydrogen and helium that constitute their atomic bread and butter. It is, in fact, pretty weird to find stars without all that metal. The record holder for the most pristine, metal-poor star was J1029+1729, which has a metallicity less than 1.4×10^-6. However, a new paper from astronomers has found a star that beats even this number: the red giant SDSS J0715-7334, having a metallicity less than 7.8 x 10^-7, an order of magnitude lower. Researchers believe this record breaker was formed from a star with the mass of 30 suns — a Population III star, that is, the first generation of stars to form after the Big Bang. It is believed that this Population III star originated in the Large Magellanic Cloud and only later migrated into the Milky Way.

Krystal Kasal, Phys.org

EF5

A June 20 tornado in South Dakota has been upgraded, upon review of the meteorological data from that day, to an EF5 twister. The Grand Forks office of the National Weather Service has now put the estimated wind speed of the tornado at 210 miles per hour. The tornado killed three people. At its largest, it was 1.05 miles wide and had a 12-mile path. It is the first EF5 tornado on U.S. soil in 12 years since a tornado outside of Oklahoma City in May 2013. There have only ever been 10 EF5 tornadoes in the United States since the NWS switched from the Fujita scale to the Enhanced Fujita scale in 2007.

Sarah Raza, The Associated Press

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