By Walt Hickey

Bait

In the latest news from the “nature is deeply messed up, man” front, two researchers analyzed 161 spiderwebs and found that spiders will incapacitate captured fireflies in order to attract males to the web that want to mate with it. The spiders kept them alive when they were able to glow in a bid to attract more fireflies, but when they were not able to glow, they were devoured immediately. It even appears that the spiders’ venom makes male firefly blinks look more like a female firefly’s blinking pattern.

Humberto Basilio, Science

College

While lots of for-profit colleges have been folding, the contraction in the numbers of college students is causing issues for your more typical private, nonprofit four-year colleges. Over 500 of them have closed in the past 10 years, and that’s affected 1.25 million students. Since 2017, we’re averaging around 60 such schools closing per year, and this year there have already been 14 closures through early August.

Milla Surjadi, The Wall Street Journal

Books

Libraries have begun to look at some of the older books in their collections, given that Victorian-era books have occasionally been found lousy with arsenic. The University of Delaware’s Poison Book Project has caught on, and 50 percent of the cloth-case bindings it’s tested so far have contained large amounts of lead, as well as other stuff like arsenic, chromium and mercury. Chrome yellow bindings have been found particularly poisonous, and any toxic books should be handled with nitrile gloves. If anything, it should finally put an end to the lie that you should not judge a book by its cover; sometimes you really should.

Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica

Horror

Horror comics are doing particularly well these days, with unit sales of the genre up 13 percent and dollar sales up 17 percent, more than outpacing the overall field of comics as a whole. Image Comics has long been a significant player in the space, with James Tynion IV’s W0rldTr33 claiming four of the five top-selling horror comics last summer. This year has also seen the revival of two legacy horror comic franchises, including both the Universal Monsters series and EC comics.

Brigid Alverson, ICv2

Cans

Metal cans are considerably more recyclable than plastics, which has made the centuries-old technology attractive to consumer packaged goods companies. Steel cans are infinitely recyclable, and have the highest recycling rate of any food packaging out there at 58 percent. Aluminum is similarly high, and recycled aluminum is in demand from packagers. Consumers have also been rejecting the latest iteration of plastic packaging, which has featured flexible pouches, with the recycling rates coming in extraordinarily low and consumers also frustrated that they can’t get all the product out of the pouches.

Shefali Kapadia, Food Dive

Diapers

Life is bookended by diapers, with the market for child diapers globally coming to $46 billion while the market for adult diapers comes in at $16.7 billion. The aging world and declining birth rates are leading to new needs for more adult diaper factories. The unit sales of baby diapers slipped 1 percent last year, while the unit sales of adult diaper products are projected to grow 8 percent a year through 2030, at which point sales will hit $28 billion globally. It can be costly to upgrade factories and add new production lines, as a machine to make one size of diapers runs about $4 million.

Patrick Sisson, Sherwood News

Bahamas

The Bahamas are the fourth-largest tax haven in the world based on assets flowing through the country, with an estimated $13.7 trillion in private household wealth parked there and an estimated $12 trillion in corporate wealth in offshore shell companies. That’s a quarter of all wealth produced annually worldwide. As recently as 2019, the offshore financial services business made up an estimated 20 percent of the Bahamas’ economy.

Brooke Harrington, The Atlantic

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

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: The Internationalists · Video Game Funding · BYD · Disney Channel Original Movie · Talon Mine · Our Moon · Rock Salt · Wind Techs ·

Yeezys · Armed Forces · Christmas Music · The Golden Screen · New York Hotels · A City on Mars · Personality Change · Graphics · You Are What You Watch ·

Comics Data · Extremely Online · Kevin Perjurer · Kia Theft Spree · Right to Repair · Chicken Sandwich Wars

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