Numlock News: September 8, 2026 • Onigiri, Outro, Herbarium

Sep 08, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Metal

Nickel and copper have been priced at a consistent ratio since the beginning of large-scale nickel mining in the 1800s, with nickel costing on average 2.85 times as much as copper on the London Metal Exchange since 1987. Lately, though, that’s fallen to 1.17 times the price, nearly even, and by one measure, copper is actually costing more than nickel. Nickel’s selling for about $14,500 per metric ton, and while the LME price for copper is $14,200 per ton, add in the treatment and refining charges and copper’s going for $15,112. One reason is processing innovations that allow the mining of Indonesian nickel laterites, opening up new, cheap ways to mine nickel, while new copper mines have been rare; demand for nickel surged thanks to robust interest in electric vehicles.

David Fickling, Bloomberg

We’re So Back

Domestic box office sales from May 1 to Labor Day came in at a remarkable $4.76 billion, the second-highest on record, behind only the 2013 summer box office high-water mark of $4.755 billion. This was also the first summer on record where each month saw over $1 billion in box office receipts. In the final weekend of the summer, Spider-Man: Brand New Day made $23.5 million, and given its momentum and $923 million so far, it’s on track to break the domestic box office record of $936 million set by Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Meanwhile, The Odyssey continues to do solid business thanks largely to IMAX, which accounted for a remarkable 30 percent of the film’s total box office and $486 million globally.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

CD

Sales of CDs are booming, with the RIAA reporting that 17.5 million CDs were sold by the music industry in the first half of the year, up 45.7 percent year over year, fueled in large part by BTS and young listeners preferring them as collectibles. While they’re not quite vinyl — which moved 26.5 million units for $543.8 billion — that is still a $171.1 million revenue stream for the music industry. According to the report, half of buyers of CDs do not in fact own a CD player.

Terrence O’Brien, The Verge

Organ

Organ donation is considerably rarer in Japan, China and South Korea than it is in other wealthy countries. In Japan, organ donation after death requires documented consent before death or approval from family members, which limits the number of donors; Japan had just 1.3 cardiac-death and brain-death donors per million people in 2024. By comparison, that figure is 53.93 donors per million in Spain (which presumes consent unless an objection is registered explicitly while living) and 49.7 donors per million in the United States. This has sent Japanese patients in need of organs overseas, and in some cases, turning to intermediaries who broker organs.

Saho Nakagawa, Nikkei Asia

Merger

In 2024, Duke University announced plans to close its herbarium given the costs associated with necessary upgrades. Last week, a new home for the 850,000 plant specimens was announced: UNC, which will be adding Duke’s plants to its own substantial collection to create the third-largest university research herbarium collection in the country with 1.7 million specimens, behind only Harvard’s and Berkeley’s.

Erik Stokstad, Science

Outro

A new analysis of 2,284 albums from across 70 years found a distinct shift in the ending songs of albums. On average, final songs were 18 percent longer than other songs on a record, and tended to be relatively unique compared to the other songs on an album. In the 1950s — when there was a rule to put loud, bass-heavy songs earlier in an album and quieter ones later because the stylus has less groove to work with on vinyl — over 60 percent of songs ended on a quiet acoustic track. That declined steadily, bottoming out at 16 percent ending that way in the 1980s, but recovered slightly back to 30 percent in the 2010s and 2020s.

Mitchell Stirling, Significance

Onigiri

Stores outside of Japan have had success selling onigiri — rice balls often stuffed with meat that are a staple meal for people on the go in Japan but had not really caught on abroad until recently. Sales of onigiri-making machines were $15.6 million in 2021, with 65 percent of that coming from Japan; by 2032, sales are expected to rise to $40.9 million, with only 45.5 percent in Japan as the food grows in popularity.

Yurika Yoneda, Nikkei Asia

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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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