You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
1 cockroach
Zoo Atlanta has named one of their newest baby animals after quarterback Tom Brady, the result of a lost Super Bowl bet with the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island (deep in New England Patriots territory). The animal that the zoo selected is a Madagascar hissing cockroach. Just so I don’t get a bunch of emails from New Englanders again, you can have, “I suppose none of their GOATs were pregnant” for free to use in your everyday life as a riposte. [Click 2 Houston]
3.5
Scientists have long thought that female sea turtles lay an average of about 3.5 clutches of eggs per year. Now new research suggests the true number may be twice as high. Scientists count clutches (or, technically, tracks leading to clutches) to estimate the turtle population, so the news, if confirmed, could mean there are half as many of the endangered reptiles as previously believed. [The Atlantic]
25 years
Pedro Hernandez faces up to 25 years in prison after being convicted of the 1979 murder of 6-year-old Etan Patz. [The New York Times]
51 pages
In a 51-page decision, three judges at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board have ruled that the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT owns the lucrative patents for gene editing technology CRISPR-Cas9. The University of California had challenged the patent, arguing that Broad’s technology was essentially a logical extension of UC scientists’ work. As far as academic fights go, this is Ali-Frazier and worth a read. [STAT News]
$8,898
The eye-popping price of Intel’s new Xeon processor, the E7-8894 v4, which is really only for the industrial-server-owning set. The processor has a maximum clock speed of 3.4 GHz. [The Verge]
$300 million
After a series of colossal screw-ups involving massive data breaches, Yahoo! is near an agreement to agree to reduce its sale price to Verizon. About $300 million will likely be chopped off what was originally a $4.8 billion deal, according to reports. [The Wall Street Journal]
If you see a significant digit in the wild, send it to @WaltHickey.