Numlock News: September 12, 2025 • Ancient Rome, Demon Slayer, BuzzBallz

Sep 12, 2025

Slayer

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle comes out in cinemas this weekend, and following the smashing success of the first film, this movie is expected to break some records. The big one? It’s expected to beat the record set by Pokémon: The First Movie in 1999 as the highest opening ever for an anime film in the U.S. Their number to beat is $31 million. Right now, advanced ticket sales are reportedly north of $15 million for the first four days, and Sony’s estimated $35 million opening weekend is looking increasingly conservative, with others thinking Infinity Castle could open to $45 million to $60 million over the period.

Anthony D’Alessandro, Deadline

BuzzBallz

Gen Z’s favorite dumb way to get drunk is BuzzBallz, brightly colored spheres the size of tennis balls filled with liquor concoctions that come in at a whopping 15 percent ABV at a sub-$5 price point. There are now over 30 offerings, and one of them is hitting hard right now: the BuzzBallz Biggies. These are 1.5-liter to 1.75-liter large spheres of cocktails, mostly under $30, containing between seven and nine BuzzBallz per Biggie. Naturally, the contest is to drink whole ones.

Olivia White, VinePair

Peanuts

While other themed entertainment from the Disney or Universal parks tend to keep characters in mind before they build out the parks, parks under the Six Flags umbrella are more of a sold-to-the-lowest bidder situation. Some of the 56 parks in the company’s portfolio have deals with the Looney Toons and the DC Comics properties, but 11 of the parks — all of which used to be Cedar Fair parks pre-merger — have renewed their existing deal to feature the Peanuts characters. Lots of the Snoopy rides weren’t even always Snoopy rides; previously many of those attractions were themed to Hanna-Barbera characters or Nickelodeon series.

Blake Taylor, Attractions Magazine

Cloudy

Every winter, an 1,800-kilometer cloud appears on Mars near the Arsia Mons volcano, appearing and disappearing daily for about three months of the year. For ages, the cause of this cloud formation was a mystery. However, new study found that the cloud’s features an only be reproduced if there is a whole lot of water vapor in the air, which is odd, because it was previously considered impossible for Mars to get humidity that high because of all that dust.

Alex Wilkins, New Scientist

Manchester

A new study published in Applied Geography looked at 1,100 neighborhoods across Greater Manchester and Nottingham from 2002 to 2019, and found that the number of bars declined by about 35 percent over the period. At the same time, restaurant numbers actually grew by about the same amount. In 2002, 43 percent of Manchester neighborhoods and 47 percent of Nottingham had no bars at all. By 2019, the number of so-called “bar deserts” was up 20-fold.

University of Manchester

What Have The Romans Ever Done For Us?

The thinking generally went that when the Romans left Britain, they took a pretty vibrant economy with them, leaving those who remained to experience an economic collapse in the absence of Roman hegemony. Turns out this is wrong, according to a new study in Antiquity. The inhabitants of Britain kept on mining and producing metals even after the legions picked up sticks in the fifth century. After analyzing the 56 elements in a 6-meter core of earth extracted from a Roman administrative center called Isurium Brigantum, researchers found a small decline in metals production in the fourth century as the Romans were leaving. There was then a rise in lead production from the mid-fifth to mid-sixth centuries, only to continue until a drop that might be timed to the Justinian plague.

Ann Gibbons, Science

DNA Casettes

DNA is great at storing information such as “how to produce a person from proteins,” so it is naturally of interest to researchers as a way of encoding other kinds of information. Researchers have made something like a cassette tape, printing synthetic DNA molecules on to a plastic tape. It is tougher to retrieve the information than with a normal cassette, but the data it can store is remarkable. A DNA cassette tape is capable of holding 3 billion pieces of music at 10 megabytes a song, with a total data storage capacity of 36 petabytes of data.

James Woodford, New Scientist

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