By Walt Hickey

Love

A new study from the Kinsey Institute asked 10,036 single adults in the United States how many times they have been passionately in love in their lifetime. The study confirmed earlier research that love can touch us one time, and last for a lifetime and never let go ‘til we’re gone. The average number of passionate loves in respondents’ lives was 2.05 experiences. This number goes up with field research that reports formative romantic experiences on doomed trans-Atlantic voyages, or four revelatory days of passion with a visiting National Geographic photojournalist taking images of the bridges in the county in which you now reside. Overall, 28 percent said they had experienced passionate love just once, 30 percent twice, 17 percent three times and 11 percent four or more times. On the other hand, 14 percent of respondents said they had never experienced passionate love; perhaps they’re mere days away from being swept off their feet by their fiancé's hot-blooded younger brother with an injured hand and a passion they’ve never felt before.

Camilla Peterson, Kinsey Institute

MetroCard

This year, New York City’s Transportation Authority discontinued the MetroCard in favor of a more durable, tap-to-pay OMNY card. This came as bad news for the artists who had spent the past several years using the iconic MetroCard as an artistic medium, and who have become desperate to snag the remaining dead cards in circulation to continue their pursuits. In the decades of use, the MTA ordered 3.2 billion MetroCards, and there’s still inventory in a high-security facility in Queens, likely tens of thousands more. I will simply point out that the New York Times does not go out of its way to describe a facility as “high-security” unless the organization behind the facility is, in fact, rather worried that a rag-tag crew of artists, merch companies, resellers and foamers are up to something.

Stefanos Chen, The New York Times

Ludus

A flat stone (212 millimeters by 145 millimeters) made out of limestone with an engraved geometric pattern found in the Netherlands was theorized to be a piece of a Roman game. A clever new study goes so far as to suggest precisely what kind of game it might have been. The key clue was visible wear on the surface, the kind you’d get if stone game pieces were pushed along the lines, with one diagonal line in particular seeing a little more wear than the rest. An AI play system simulated thousands of possible games with 130 rule variations and different starting pieces drawn from known ancient board games such as haretavl and gioco dell’orso. It found that the observed wear was consistent with nine similar blocking games where the goal is to stop one’s opponent from moving their pieces. The game has been tentatively called Ludus Coriovalli. Since this is a European board game, I can’t wait to presumably spend $80 on a Kickstarter to bring this vision to life sometime in 2029, only for it to languish on my shelf for months thereafter.

Chris Simms, New Scientist

Hydrogen

Earth’s core is made up of iron, but there’s also a lot of hydrogen jammed in there, too. A new study took samples of iron and samples of hydrous silicate glass — the first representing Earth’s core, the second the magma ocean of an early Earth — and heated them to 4,827 degrees Celsius, then they squished the samples between diamond anvils to a pressure of 111 gigapascals to simulate the amount of hydrogen that’s probably present in the core. By weight, researchers estimated that hydrogen represented 0.07 percent to 0.36 percent of the core, which (if you extrapolate to the core of Earth) means that there’s nine to 45 times the amount of hydrogen in our oceans jammed into the core of the planet.

Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American

Flight

Two budget airlines in Mexico are planning to merge: Grupo Viva Aerobus and Volaris (full name: Controladora Vuela Compañía de Aviación SAB). The proposal has the support of the government, given the hope for more investment in services. However, some are concerned since the merger would result in a behemoth that controls about 70 percent of Mexico’s passenger airline market. Regular airfares in Mexico have risen 37 percent in the past four years. The pair of budget airlines and Aeromexico already combine for a 99 percent market share when it comes to passenger air service.

Juan Pablo Spinetto, Bloomberg

Wizards

Hasbro made $4.7 billion in 2025, but the profits for the toymaker largely came from Wizards of the Coast, which makes Magic: The Gathering cards as well as the Dungeons & Dragons product line. All told, Wizards of the Coast saw revenues up 45 percent, with Magic up 59 percent year over year. The $1.01 billion in operating profit from the Wizards division constituted the bulk of the entire company’s operating profit of $1.14 billion, with Wizards pulling an eye-watering 46 percent operating margin.

The Toy Book

Colostrum

The first milk from a breastfeeding mammal is known as colostrum, which contains nutrients and antibodies that are essential for the newborn’s immune system. A new trend has emerged: consuming the colostrum of cows, which advocates claim has a number of health and beauty benefits related to the aforementioned advantages. It’s still a generally small section of the broader supplement industry, but the growth has been remarkable. In the 52 weeks ending January 3, 2026, consumers in the United States spent $19 million on colostrum supplements and another $3 million on supplements that count it as one of several ingredients. Thats more than 3,000 percent of the $612,000 spent two years before. The vibe is that this is very much the start of something, as other supplements — melatonin, for instance, a $1 billion business in 2025 — see growth slow.

Deena Shanker, Bloomberg

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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian · Across the Movie Aisle · Radioactive Shrimp ·

Bioluminescent · CaaStle · Everyone Knows · Buzzballz · Such Great Heights · NFL · Sea Ice · Second · Made in China · Dinosaurs · Tracking · ICE ·

Vera Rubin · Dasani · Uncharted · Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

By Walt Hickey

Hershey’s

Confectioner Hershey’s has been quietly building up a portfolio of salty snacks that have come to generate 10 percent of its $11 billion in annual revenue. The revenue has been fueled by the acquisition of four salty brands since 2017: SkinnyPop popcorn, Pirate’s Booty cheese puffs, Dot’s Homestyle pretzels and LesserEvil, which makes organic snacks. In just Q4, the brands combined for $357 million in sales, up 28 percent year over year. Dot’s has doubled its market share in the pretzel business to 22 percent since being acquired four years ago, and SkinnyPop is now up to 26 percent of the ready-to-eat popcorn business.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Bad Bunny

Viewership for Bad Bunny’s halftime show at Super Bowl LX came in at 135 million, according to initial reports from Apple yet to be confirmed by Nielsen. Were those figures to pan out, this puts Bad Bunny narrowly ahead of the viewership of the Kendrick Lamar halftime show in 2025 (which had 133.4 million tune-ins) to be the most-watched halftime show ever.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Abandon Ship

In 2016, there were 20 ships abandoned around the world, according to the International Transport Workers’ Federation. It is a situation that leaves the crew geopolitically adrift, since the crews themselves are also abandoned by ownership along with the vessels in strange ports with no way to get home. The rise of off-the-books fleets and the abuse of flags of convenience has only made the problem worse. Last year, there were 410 abandoned vessels, which affected 6,223 merchant seamen — each figure up by about a third over 2024. Ships flying under a flag of convenience — registered in a country with little oversight like Panama, Liberia and the Marshall Islands — accounted for 82 percent of abandoned ships, despite only accounting for 46.5 percent of merchant ships by weight.

David Waddell, BBC News

Asphalt

A new study looked at the real-world performance of new road-making technology that blends recycled plastic into asphalt to make roads. The study found that replacing eight to 10 percent of the petroleum-based binder bitumen with melted plastic (from the likes of single-use bags and plastic bottles) resulted in a number of structural and environmental benefits. All told, they sequestered about 4.5 tons of plastic waste in every mile of a one-lane road in a project near Dallas. Structurally, adding in the plastic waste was similar to the effect rebar has on concrete, with the roads more resilient to extreme temperatures and high traffic. A 2024 study found that the release of microplastics from such recycled plastic-asphalt was a thousand times less than the release of rubber particles from worn tires.

Md S Hossain, The Conversation

EV

China’s electric vehicle business is increasingly looking international in pursuit of growth, in no small part because the domestic industry has been flooded with aspiring automakers and the business is so cutthroat that it’s hard to squeak out profits within China. Altogether, EV exports from China increased 70 percent year over year to 3.43 million vehicles last year, with the United Arab Emirates (192,000 Chinese vehicles sold last year) and Mexico (221,000) as the fastest-growing markets. Only 15 of the China’s129 electric vehicle brands are expected to be profitable in 2030, and 400 EV brands have collapsed since 2018.

Kinling Lo, Rest of World

Crawfish

In Louisiana, rice and crawfish are often grown together in the same flooded fields. However, a pair of invasive species is threatening both of those harvests, as apple snails have been thriving in the crawfish ecosystems and tiny insects called delphacids have been wreaking havoc on rice crops. Apple snails can survive in all kinds of weather, lay thousands of eggs every month and can be the size of a baseball when fully grown. Pesticides are not an option, as the chemicals that can kill snails will also hurt crustaceans. Additionally, since people tend to eat rice and crawfish (rather than them ending up in animal feed), the chemicals available to be used are pretty limited anyway. The delphacids are a particularly tricky problem; when Texas was hit with a surge of the tiny bugs last year, yields dropped 50 percent in the second rice crop of the year.

Melina Walling and Joshua A. Bickel, The Associated Press

Island Life

Researchers have found evidence that humans visited the Kitsissut Islands northwest of Greenland between 3,938 and 4,400 years ago — a trek that would have required them to cross a minimum of 52.7 kilometers of open water, a remarkable sea voyage in the Arctic. The researchers found five sites with a total of 297 archaeological features on the three islands of Isbjørne, Mellem and Nordvest. The only comparable Arctic crossing is the 82-kilometer Bering Strait. What’s fascinating is that the region of water these researchers looked into — the Pikialasorsuaq polynya — only formed about 4,500 years ago, before which it was under lots and lots of ice. This would indicate that humans visited somewhat shortly after the emergence of the islands.

Michael Marshall, New Scientist

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian · Across the Movie Aisle · Radioactive Shrimp ·

Bioluminescent · CaaStle · Everyone Knows · Buzzballz · Such Great Heights · NFL · Sea Ice · Second · Made in China · Dinosaurs · Tracking · ICE ·

Vera Rubin · Dasani · Uncharted · Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Box Office

The Super Bowl is more culturally dominant than ever, which means that the game’s effect on the box office is increasingly pronounced. Before the pandemic, the weekend of the Super Bowl was generally a bad weekend at the box office, but far from an apocalyptic one, generally coming in at $75 million to $85 million across the board. This year came in at about $60 million, led by Send Help with a respectable $10 million in its second weekend. This is partially because studios are hesitant to release counter-programming against an event that has truly achieved cultural hegemony. Only independent distributors had the guts to release a Kevin James romantic comedy of a K-pop concert documentary into the yawning maw of The Big Game.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Curling

It’s curling’s time to shine, as the Winter Olympics standout — chess on ice! – is once again hitting the airwaves. Its year-round fans hope to capitalize on the sport’s prime time placement and grow membership in the 170 clubs across the United States, according to USA Curling. The governing body sees what’s happened for pickleball and wants some of that for curling; the most athletically challenging element of the game is throwing the stone, and the sport can be easy on beginners. The issue is that it’s easy to turn a tennis court into a pickleball court with an extra set of painted lines, while curling needs to compete against hockey and figure skating for ice time on rinks that don’t even feature the pebbled ice that the sport demands. That said, many clubs have begun to secure exclusive ice: about 90 of the 170 member clubs use a curling-only venue.

Chris Gallagher, Bloomberg

Confetti

Artistry in Motion is a company that handles confetti for rock concerts, political conventions and sporting events like last night’s Super Bowl, which is the big event for the company. The company trucks in 300 pounds of two-colored confetti for each of the teams to the Super Bowl. The cannons are brought onto the field with four minutes remaining and lined up around the walls of the stadium, but they don’t push the button until the clock hits triple zero. The confetti itself is made by Seaman Paper, which produces roughly 150,000 pounds of tissue paper per day, making this a rather small order for the company but a prestigious one.

Donna Gordon Blankinship, The Associated Press

Graphic Novels

At bookstores, sales of comics and graphic novels had a banner 2025, with unit sales up five percent year over year and up 42 percent since 2020. The new readers gained over the course of the pandemic are indeed here to stay, the report from Circana reveals. Sales of graphic novels for kids rose four percent while those for adults increased nine percent; manga and other East Asian comics were up 11 percent.

Brigid Alverson, ICV2

Lots Of Places Out-Pizza The Hut

Yum Brands, which owns Pizza Hut, plans to close 250 restaurants out of over 6,000 in the United States during the first half of the year, as Pizza Hut struggles to compete amid growing competition. Same-store sales dropped five percent last year, while over at archrival Domino’s, same-store sales rose 2.7 percent. It’s difficult times for a restaurant that was, for a time there, a load-bearing pillar of American literacy; globally, Pizza Hut ended the year with 19,974 stores globally, down a net 251 locations year over year. The business does really well in China, evidently, which is responsible for 19 percent of sales.

Dee-Ann Durbin, The Associated Press

B1

A new paper from a team of 37 biologists conclusively identified what had been causing a mysterious illness among a California salmon population: a lethal vitamin B1 deficiency was driving the population’s decline. Generally, about 200,000 winter-run chinook return to spawn in the Sacramento River, but from 2021 to 2024, roughly 40 percent to 50 percent of salmon fry may have died. In 2025, about 36 percent of the fry died from it. It appears that the vitamin deficiency is related to the rise of the northern anchovy; prior to about 2014, the Sacramento River chinook would eat a diverse diet of forage fish in the Pacific, but from 2014 to 2021, the population of northern anchovy surged for reasons as yet unclear. This caused problems for the salmon because the northern anchovy has a high concentration of thiaminase, an enzyme that has been found to destroy thiamine in the digestive tract of a predator. This meant that as the anchovy became a bigger portion of the salmon’s diet, the thiaminase they consumed gave the population a massive B1 deficiency, and that was killing them.

Alastair Bland, bioGraphic

Glass Cloth

T-glass is a difficult-to-produce component in advanced chips, used in reinforcement layers under or around the chips to ensure the packaging of the hardware components isn’t warped when the processors heat up. Virtually all of the glass comes from a century-old Japanese textile company called Nittobo, which isn’t able to bring new capacity online until the second half of the year. This means T-glass is currently in shortage, pushing Nittobo to raise prices by as much as 25 percent this coming year. Advanced chip manufacturing is full of these charming little materials science bottlenecks, as seen when Ajinomoto, which is best known for producing the MSG flavoring, is now a crucial link in the AI chip supply chain because they’re the only ones who make a special film that goes on the underside of chips.

Yang Jie, The Wall Street Journal

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian · Across the Movie Aisle · Radioactive Shrimp ·

Bioluminescent · CaaStle · Everyone Knows · Buzzballz · Such Great Heights · NFL · Sea Ice · Second · Made in China · Dinosaurs · Tracking · ICE ·

Vera Rubin · Dasani · Uncharted · Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture ·

Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Keezy Young, the author of the 2025 graphic novel Hello, Sunshine and the new comic It’s Bitter, Baby, and it’s Very Sweet.

Hello, Sunshine was one of my favorite books of last year, Young’s got a phenomenal artistic style and the graphic novel was a clever and immersive mystery that I’ve still been thinking about months later. With the release of their horror one-shot It’s Bitter, Baby, and it’s Very Sweet, I wanted to have Keezy on to talk about the books.

Hello, Sunshine can be found wherever books are sold, It’s Bitter, Baby, and it’s Very Sweet is available for purchase and download at Itch.io, and Keezy Young can be found on BlueSky.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Keezy, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

I absolutely loved Hello Sunshine when it came out last year. You are out with a brand new comic that is available on your Itch.io called It’s Bitter Baby, and it’s Very Sweet. I wanted to have you on because I think that you have a really striking style. I love your storytelling. You’re at this really interesting intersection of mystery and horror; what would you say draws you towards that subgenre?

I’ve always been drawn toward it ever since I was a little kid. I was sneaking downstairs to watch X-Files through the slats on my stairs after I was supposed to be in bed. And X-Files is like the perfect mix between horror and mystery, I think. I loved all of the old 1950s giant monster movies. I loved all of the ’80s wet puppet movies, all that stuff. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. This has always been in my blood, I guess you could say.

When I started making comics about it, it was just a natural place to go — to write about my favorite thing, the thing that compels me the most and hooks me the most. I find it very exhilarating to be able to do that for other people, too.

You mentioned the X-Files, one thing I’ve enjoyed a lot about your work is that there are supernatural elements in it, but it is also grounded in people’s psychological states. It’s a really interesting midpoint between that very, very realistic region of terror and that very, very supernatural phenomenon of interesting mystery.

I was actually just having a conversation with a friend about an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin, where she says (and I’m paraphrasing here, because I didn’t actually read the essay) something like, “You’re using supernatural elements to tell the truth.” I think that really resonated with me, because I always want to be telling some truth and I want to be saying something meaningful.

I’m using supernatural elements or magic or whatever it is to get those ideas across in a new and interesting way, find a back alley avenue to get readers there, and get them thinking. But the core of it has to be something that is real. So, for Hello Sunshine, for example, the core is mental illness. There’s supernatural elements, there are ghosts and that stuff, but it is really more of a story about mental illness, not necessarily a story about ghosts.

I think a lot of supernatural stuff also lends itself to that really well, because it’s all coming from our psyches. What are ghosts? They represent a lot of things. They represent grief for lost loved ones. They represent fear of the unknown, what’s going to happen to us after we die. All of these things go into it naturally. In some ways, it’s easier for me to write about real things with supernatural elements than it is to just write about real things.

You use point-of-view in this very, very fascinating way. “Unreliable narrator” is one way to phrase it. I read It’s Bitter Baby, and it’s Very Sweet like three times because I had to go through each time to see exactly what was really grounded and what had these more supernatural elements.

I think that psychosis, for example, is the mental illness specifically that Hello Sunshine is about, and one that I’ve written about before, because I have bipolar disorder with psychosis. By definition, you’re experiencing something that isn’t real, but it feels completely real to you in the moment. I definitely put some of that into my work.

I think every character is experiencing their own reality, regardless of whether they’re unwell or not. And it’s really important for me to honor that and respect it. Even if I’m suggesting that this isn’t really happening, it is really happening for that character. Their feelings are real, and their fears are real and all that stuff.

It’s a fun storytelling tool to be able to switch POV and have it be different from different people’s points of view. It’s like a clever storytelling tool. You don’t have to say it directly, necessarily. You get to leave it up to readers to figure out for themselves what exactly they think is really going on and whether that is even a meaningful question to ask. I think what is really going on in real life or whatever isn’t necessarily the most interesting thing going on. And you can get a lot out of something that’s going on in somebody’s head.

I would love to talk a little bit about your process. I think the art is particularly gorgeous. I love your backgrounds. How did you settle into the style?

I actually went through a lot of style problems for a while there. When I was in my 20s and whatnot, I was trying different things. I was trying to figure out what my niche was. I finally landed on style being not what you’re best at drawing, but what you have most fun drawing. I realized things, like I don’t really like shading. I like just using flats for the most part, so I’m just gonna not shade. And I think it looks fine. It looks great. If anybody out there is struggling with their style in any creative field, I would definitely lean toward figuring out what you have the most fun doing — what you really enjoy doing, and just lean into that. That’s what your style is. It doesn’t matter how good you are at it or how good you are at something else that you don’t like doing. If you don’t like doing it, then what’s the point?

Yeah, it’s also just so rich. The colors are so really lovely. You’re making me go back to reading a fourth time now, checking out the shading.

Yeah, I am. One of the things I noticed was that I like doing backgrounds, actually, but I don’t like doing really super detailed stuff. I use the same size brush. I do everything digitally, which means you can change the size of brushes as many times as you want. You can make it giant. You can make it small. You can make it incrementally different. But I use just one size, maybe two sizes — for outlines and then for everything else. And sticking with that one size was very freeing in some ways, because it let me focus on what was actually important in the art in a more profound way than trying to get every single detail that exists. When you’re focusing on something that’s very distant from the reader, something far in the background, you can say, “What actually is important to depict there?”

I think that backgrounds can be really revealing. You can show all kinds of interesting things about what’s in a character’s bedroom, for example. Little, little tiny details: what posters they have on their wall, how messy it is and that sort of thing. And using certain tools, like the same size of brush all the time, means that I’m really only focused on that. I’m not focused on trying to add every single detail. I’m not focused on how good it looks necessarily. It’s more about the content of it. It’s about communicating something.

I do want to call out your colors, too, which I really enjoy, particularly in your graphic novel work. You can actually see the temperature of the book change as you proceed deeper into it. It’s just a really cool effect.

Thank you. Colors are probably my favorite part overall. I know a lot of people don’t really like doing them, but I really think that it can add so much nuance and storytelling detail.

Early on, these kids, their best friend is missing, and they’re trying to find him. But at this point, it’s still very Scooby-Doo-like: they’re making jokes, they’re having fun a little bit, trying to solve this mystery, despite their grief at having lost this guy. And at that point, it’s very bright. It’s very sunny. It’s a lot of bold colors, like blues and reds and yellows and that sort of thing. As we get further into the story and things take a turn for the darker, I wanted to have it literally take a turn for the darker and start using some unsettling color schemes, too. It’s not just that it’s dark. It’s also that skin tones are a little bit off, a little bit too green, maybe. There’s an element of uneasiness throughout the entire thing.

You can also bring back those bold, bright, warm colors in interesting ways, then, because it’s such a contrast. You suddenly remember, “Oh, I am living in this uneasy, disconcerting, dark world right now. I had almost forgotten what this brighter world can look like.” And that is what Mental illness feels like sometimes. So yeah, that was very intentional.

Yeah, it’s a really superb effect. And it’s an atmospheric thing that comics as a medium are particularly well-suited for compared to other mediums. I do want to talk a little bit about your most recent work. It’s Bitter Baby, and it’s Very Sweet. This was just delightful. It was such a quick, fun, really cool thing. How did this come together? Hello Sunshine was a work with a publisher, but this is just you doing a cool solo story.

I’ll be honest, I was bored. I am waiting to be able to pitch my next graphic novel project. It’s a lot of publishing nonsense going on: rehiring editors and waiting for sales data and all that sort of stuff. So I’m on hold at the moment.

I’ve just been twiddling my thumbs a little bit, doing side projects and that sort of thing while I wait. But I really missed doing comics. Comics are my favorite thing to do. It had been like months and months since I’d actually drawn a comic page. So last August or, something that, I started the story. I was just like, “Okay, I can’t stand this anymore. I need to draw something.” I whipped it up in a couple of days and scripted it in another week and then started drawing.

It came together really quickly — maybe even too quickly for the amount of time that I actually ended up working on the art because it is 34 pages long, which is quite long for a short comic. I probably could have stood to spend a little bit more time thinking through the script, but I think it turned out well. So I’m glad to hear that people are enjoying it. I’m really glad to hear that you liked it.

It is a story about three kids. It’s two kids and then one of their bullies who are all teenagers who go into a basement on Halloween in 1994 and find something uncomfortable about one of their classmates. It’s about nostalgia and a lot of people in my generation are very nostalgic for our young childhoods. I was a little kid in 1994, and especially around Halloween, that’s one of the most fun things that we could do. I wanted to poke holes in that a little tiny bit. So that’s the premise of that story.

You’ve been so generous with your time. Where can folks find you and where can they find these books?

Hello Sunshine is available pretty much anywhere books are sold. It is from Little Brown. You can do ebook, there’s a hard cover and a soft cover. You can find it at Barnes & Noble or whatnot or order it from your local indie, which is my favorite thing to suggest.

It’s Bitter, Baby, and it’s Very Sweet is only available digitally at the moment from Itch.io. I will be printing copies of it to bring to comic conventions, so if you happen to be at Emerald City Comic Con in March next month, I will have it there. But I have no plans to do a wide release at this point. So you might have to be okay with just a PDF.

As far as where you can find me, I’m very active on BlueSky. Actually, it is probably the place that I’m at most. I’m just @KeezyYoung on there. I’m Keezy Young pretty much everywhere. I’m on Instagram, Tumblr, Itch.io. I also have a Patreon newsletter; you can pay what you want, or you can follow me for free. You get all the same content that everybody else does. I’ll announce my events and I post all my new art there and that sort of thing. And that’s, as well, just Keezy Young.

Edited by Crystal Wang

If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber!

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Michelangelo

A sketch by the artist Michelangelo has sold for $23 million at auction, about 10 times the original estimate. The sketch features the foot of the Libyan Sibyl, a painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church. Done in red chalk, it’s believed to date to 1511 or 1512. It’s a remarkable discovery that really carries through to the modern day, and one that the artists of today might even find endearing; yes, even Michelangelo drew pictures of feet as commissions for his patrons in order to put a roof over his head, and eventually it paid off.

Olivia Ireland, BBC News

Freezer

Refrigeration typically requires the use of refrigerants, chemicals that can be dangerous for the environment if they were to escape. Researchers have been studying other alternative means of cooling, and some at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have published a paper in Nature describing the first elastocaloric device capable of reaching subzero temperatures. Instead of using a refrigerant, they use shape-memory alloys (SMA) that can release heat when compressed and absorb heat when relaxed. The nickel-titanium SMA used is fashioned into rods. Those tubes are compressed, causing them to heat up. Next, a salty liquid is pumped through, carrying that heat away. Then the tubes are released, cooling them down in a cycle that takes one second. The system was able to cool down a chamber to negative four degrees Celsius after an hour in real-world conditions, freezing a vial of water.

Laurie Winkless, IEEE Spectrum

Beats

A new study played Bach’s piano compositions to an audience of 49 sleeping newborns. Of the songs, 10 were the original melodies and four featured scrambled melodies and pitches. Monitoring the babies with electroencephalography, researchers were able to detect when the babies’ brainwaves showed signs of surprise. They found that the newborns exhibited signs of surprise when the rhythm changed unexpectedly. This shows that even two-day-old newborns can anticipate rhythmic patterns, meaning that you have absolutely no excuse to be clapping on the wrong beat at a concert; even babies know you’re off tempo.

Public Library of Science

Why So Sirius

SiriusXM has been great at signing a legion of successful podcasters to its portfolio, becoming the No. 1 network in terms of reach according to Edison Research. Podcast ad revenue for the company grew by 41 percent over the last year, which is solid. That said, the purpose of those podcast acquisitions — listeners hopefully being converted into actual subscribers for SiriusXM’s satellite radio platform and streaming app — sure looks to be a miss. In 2019, there were 34.9 million subscribers to SiriusXM. In 2025, that fell to 32.9 million, indicating that the push into podcasting has not staunched the move away from radio.

Ashley Carman, Bloomberg

Game Time

A team of researchers monitored smartwatch data from 229 fans of the German Football Association’s Arminia Bielefeld team over a 12-week period, beginning 10 days before the 2025 DFB-Pokal Cup final and finishing 10 weeks after. Researchers found that the mean stress level of participants was 41 percent higher on the day of the cup final than it was on non-match days, with stress levels rising in the hours ahead of a match. The effect was more pronounced for in-person fans: the mean heart rate was 23 percent higher among fans watching in the Olympiastadion live compared to those watching on television or in public.

Deborah Kendall-Cheeseman, Scientific Reports

Quakes

Most earthquakes occur in the Earth’s crust, but a rare type occurs in the mantle. These continental mantle earthquakes don’t often cause much shaking or danger on the surface, but are still interesting. After all, it wasn’t even a sure thing that the mantle could support significant seismic activity in the first place, given its viscosity. The boundary between the crust and the mantle is the Moho, or the Mohorovičić discontinuity. Most earthquakes occur at a depth of six to 18 miles, but occasionally earthquakes have been found as much as 50 miles below the Moho, well into the mantle. A new analysis of 46,000 earthquakes since 1990 found a conservative estimate of 459 identified continental mantle earthquakes over the period.

Stanford University

Recovery

The asteroid impact that put a decisive end to the Cretaceous 66 million years ago wiped out 75 percent of species in the immediate aftermath and the subsequent winter. A new study published in Geology found that microscopic marine organisms rebounded incredibly quickly, all things considered. The study looked at evidence of planktic forams — tiny shelled organisms the size of a grain of sand that serve as a solid bellwether for the health of a marine ecosystem and the nutrients within it. The asteroid wiped out about 90 percent of the living planktic foram species. While previous studies suggested it took at least 30,000 years for the population to proliferate and 600,000 years for new forams to evolve, the new data found that the little organisms were back within 2,000 years of the impact.

Taylor Mitchell Brown, Science

This week in the Sunday Edition, I spoke to Barry Hertz, who wrote Welcome to the Family: The Explosive Story Behind Fast & Furious, the Blockbusters that Supercharged the World. I am on record as a big fan of the Fast and Furious franchise, I find it fascinating and one of the most interesting ongoing works in studio blockbuster narrative filmmaking, and I was super excited for this book.

Numlock Sunday: Barry Hertz on Welcome To The Family

Crystal Wang

·

Feb 1

We spoke about how these movies changed the industry, the behind-the-scenes fiascos that defined their production, and how these things actually got made.

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