By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Cigars

Habanos S.A. has a global monopoly on Cuban cigar sales, and business is booming. The joint venture of Cubatabaco and Altadis had sales up to $827 million, an increase of 16 percent year over year. Key markets include Spain, Switzerland, Great Britain and China. The cigar boom is leading to an overall increase in demand for the various accouterments of the hobby, such as sophisticated humidors designed to maximize the longevity of the cigars by regulating temperature and humidity; these price up to thousands of dollars.

Andrea Rodríguez, The Associated Press

MH370

Malaysia’s government agreed to resume and expand the search for MH370, the Boeing 777 that disappeared after taking off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing in 2014 with 227 passengers and 12 crew onboard. A U.S. exploration firm, Ocean Infinity, has been enlisted to continue the search. The company was involved in the first canvas of the ocean — which ended in 2018 — and covered an area of 120,000 square kilometers in the southern Indian Ocean. The new search will expand the search area by 15,000 square kilometers and will run for 18 months.

Reuters

Herculaneum

A man who died in bed in the city of Herculaneum in the year 79 CE when the volcano Vesuvius erupted was found to have black, glass-like shards inside his skull. This, according to a new study published in Scientific Reports, is the poor man’s brain. It had turned into black glass shards as a cloud of scorching ash passed through the city, hastily heating the urban area and then quickly dissipating, facilitating the formation of glass. What a way to go.

Collin Blinder, Science

Monolith

The game studio Monolith was shut down by Warner Bros. Games earlier this week. An interesting reverberation of shutdown relates to U.S. patent 2016279522A1, which protects the “Nemesis System” that the studio was known for. Video game patents are rare — in general about 50 percent of patents get granted, but only 6 percent of video game patent filings actually get approved — and this one relates to a unique system designed and used in games like Shadow of Mordor. It allowed encountered adversaries to gain motivation, strengths and weaknesses alongside the player’s character throughout the gaming adventure. It is a neat twist on the endless encounters one might have in these games. It’s a clever idea that can increase the verisimilitude of a game, but unfortunately, it will be one locked away in Warner Bros. I.P. vault until August 2036.

Kevin Purdy, Ars Technica

Netflix

Netflix released its six-month data dump, illustrating just how hit-driven and top-heavy the streaming business is. According to Netflix, 15,663 titles got at least 100,000 views in the back half of the year, only 29 percent of which hit 1 million views or more. The top 1 percent of titles accounted for 22.32 billion hours of viewing (which was 24 percent of the total viewing minutes) from just 156 titles alone. All told: the top 10 percent of titles were responsible for 68 percent of all viewing, good for 64.16 billion hours.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Chains

The NFL will adopt automated measurements of first downs in 2025, setting aside the age-old ten-yard chain measurement system with a sophisticated Sony ball monitoring system. That being said, game officials will continue to spot the ball between plays, and the physical chains will stay on the sidelines during the year as a backup and a visual aid for the players and coaches. The NFL says that the automated process takes 30 seconds to check if the first down has been made, while the existing manual process comes in at 75 seconds give or take. On average, 12 measurements were made during each week of the regular season.

Jacob Feldman, Sportico

Ants

The effectiveness of ants at cleaning detritus off a rainforest floor at their scale can be hard to fully understand. Thanks to their biomechanics and the physiology of their mandibles and necks, ants can lift stuff more than 5,000 times their body weight, which again should probably make Ant-Man more interesting than he actually is but, like, here we are. Ants are responsible for 25 percent of the terrestrial biomass in tropical forests, again provoking the question of why Ant-Man lives in Manhattan. Their ability to move lots and lots of material is impressive: one nest can harvest two metric tons of leaves annually, which again, I guess would be a lot more impressive if Ant-Man specifically fought flora-based adversaries with leaf-based offensive equipment, instead of Thanos.

Krista Langlois, bioGraphic

It’s Oscar weekend! Don’t forget that there’s a whole spinoff newsletter of Numlock about award season, if you want to check it out.

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