Numlock News: June 17, 2026 • Batteries, Butterflies, Bonvoy

By Walt Hickey

Battery

In 2025, battery energy storage stations cost $78 per megawatt-hour generated, which is down 27 percent year over year. That is also down significantly from $185 per megawatt-hour generated in 2020, as the price of the storage batteries themselves has dropped to $70 per kilowatt-hour thanks to a surge in production by manufacturers based in China. That $78 per megawatt-hour generated is particularly significant: It means that the levelized cost of energy for battery tech is now less than OG gas-fired power plants, which came in at $102 per megawatt-hour, and is on the cusp of edging out coal’s $77 per megawatt-hour.

Mao Kawano and Koki Izumi, Nikkei Asia

Bonvoy

A group of 51 hotel owners representing about 1,000 Marriott-branded hotels are now pressing the brand to share more of the revenue reaped from the Bonvoy loyalty program with the franchisees. The program added 43 million members last year and ended the first three months of the year with 283 million members, and when those members cash in on their loyalty points, the hotels get a reimbursement from the brand that, according to the franchisees, lowballs them. Marriott makes a whole lot of money from credit cards that pay into the program, fees totaling $716 million in 2025, up from $410 million in 2019, and fee revenue is expected to increase by 35 percent to nearly $1 billion this year.

Kate King, The Wall Street Journal

Reptiles

Reptilian pets are increasing in popularity, with the number of households in the United States possessing a pet snake increasing from 810,000 in 2018 to 1.3 million in 2024. This has spurred the industry that supplies care and feeding for those snakes, and has spawned a unique form of factory farming that breeds hundreds of millions of mice and rats annually to feed them. The thing is, unlike animals raised for human food, mice and rats aren’t covered under the Animal Welfare Act, so the operations that produce them have no animal welfare oversight.

Kenny Torrella, Vox

Butterflies

A new study published in Nature Communications looks at butterflies of the Heliconius tribe; they are interesting because of their uniquely long lifespans compared to other butterflies, which tend to live for only a few weeks. Some species of Heliconius butterflies tend to live three times longer than even close relatives; for instance, Dione juno butterflies live only 14 days, but the Heliconius hewitsoni has a maximum lifespan of 348 days, nearly a year. The study suggests that the cause of that abnormally long life is that at the one species in the tribe does not show any physiological decline as it ages and delays the aging process.

Joanne Fryer, University of Bristol

FroYo

Somehow, frozen yogurt has returned: In the United States, servings of frozen yogurt rose 26 percent year over year to 87 million in the year ending March, according to Circana, driven in large part by younger consumers who presumably missed the initial two waves of frozen yogurt shops. The first was in the late 1980s and 1990s, coinciding with a number of fitness fads and a low-cal era. The second was in the 2000s when the likes of Pinkberry emerged, pushing build-your-own froyo cups, and now it appears we are once again in a froyo phase. I’m setting my calendar for the late 2030s as an ideal time to invest in a dairy.

Rainier Harris and Daniela Sirtori, Bloomberg

Justice

A new study published in Judicature finds that in general, serving on a jury makes people tend to have a better attitude towards the court system, which incidentally comes at a time when a smaller fraction of trials are actually going to jury. Survey respondents who had reported for jury service in the past five years viewed courts as more legitimate and trusted courts more. Meanwhile, the percentage of adults who said they reported for jury service in the previous five years fell from an average of nine percent before 2020 to just four percent in 2025.

Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania

Tortoises

Florida has been developing many regions that were previously the habitat for the gopher tortoise, a native species that has been considered for placement on the Endangered Species List given the habitat loss due to new construction. There has been a relocation program in place since 2009 that requires developers to hire authorized individuals to relocate gopher tortoises on land slated for development. From 2009 to 2023, over 97,000 tortoises have been moved around the state, enough to make the gopher tortoise the most-relocated animal in the Southeast and leading some scientists to conclude that about a third of the entire gopher tortoise population of the state of Florida has been relocated at some point in the past 15 years.

Stephanie Castellano, bioGraphic

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Numlock News: June 16, 2026 • Mines, COBOL, Pufferfish

By Walt Hickey

Minesweeper

While the United States and Iran are reportedly approaching a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, it will realistically be some time before the number of ships that pass through the Strait daily — currently around 12 to 15 vessels per day — recovers back to the 120 to 140 vessels from before the war began. One reason is mines, which naval forces have placed at some locations in the Strait. An operation by conventional minesweepers and underwater drones to clear the Strait could take 40 to 50 days before the insurance, shipping and oil companies are satisfied that it’s sufficiently safe to sail. Given that a supertanker and its cargo of crude oil are worth about $300 million, war risk underwriters can understandably get skittish even at a whiff of mines.

Jonathan Saul, Reuters

Pufferfish

There are about 200 species of pufferfish that live in the warm waters of the world, and currently three can be found in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, among them the silver-cheeked pufferfish. As water temperatures warm, the population of silver-cheeked Lagocephalus sceleratus has exploded in the waters off of Greece, and they are wreaking havoc on the fishing industry. Native to the Indian and Pacific oceans and the Red Sea, the fish made its way to the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal, and has been causing damage to nets and eating the catch of fishermen off Greece’s coast. Ordinarily, invasive species can go directly onto menus. However, pufferfish have a deadly toxin that makes them inedible, which removes that option of population control. Furthermore technically a pufferfish is considered class one waste, the same tier as industrial waste, making them annoying to dispose of on top of everything else. Instead, the fishing industry is lobbying the government to pay the agencies to catch and kill the species.

Will Vassilopoulos and Angelos Tzortzinis, Agence France-Presse

Microbiomes

Researchers analyzed the oral and gut microbiomes of 430 people living in 230 households, identifying microbial strains and figuring out what was common across people. Overall, cohabitating individuals shared 19 percent of their gut microbiome and 26 percent of their oral microbiome strains. That’s significantly higher than the commonality of microbiomes overall; among individuals in different households, there was just six percent shared gut microbiome and zero percent shared oral microbiome. The oral microbiome is probably from kissing: romantic partners shared 44 percent of their oral microbiome.

Julia Grimmett, Cell Press

Power

A new poll found that billionaires, CEOs, men and white Americans are seen as having the most power in the United States, with 75 percent of respondents saying that billionaires have a lot of political power, compared to just eight percent who said the same thing about workers. In general, 64 percent said workers should have more power, 54 percent said small-business owners should, 51 percent said women should have more power and 45 percent said the same about both scientists and public-school teachers. Overall, 62 percent of respondents said that billionaires should have less political power.

David Montgomery, YouGov

Cruises

China’s government wants to improve the cruise industry serving the country, seeing it as a pathway towards tourism growth. Globally, there were 37.2 million cruise passengers last year, of whom just 1.14 million hailed from China, good for about 800 passengers per million people. Globally, the average is around 4,600 cruise passengers per million people, and in the United States, it’s about 60,000 passengers per million. China could be a beneficiary of the cruise book; While more than 90 percent of cruise ships in operation are built in Europe, China handles 60 percent of global orders for merchant ships in general. Learn how to install a Lido Deck on one of those suckers and who knows what might happen.

Kohei Fujimura, Nikkei Asia

COBOL Cowboys

The last of the original generation of programmers and architects of IBM’s Common Business-Oriented Language are retiring, and that’s an issue for many state and local agencies that rely on mainframes built from that codebase for taxes, licensing, justice and benefits. The systems are stable and consistent and work well, so they’ve often never been updated, but the shrinking pool of specialists who can keep them running is a point of concern. According to IBM, 89 percent of state governments use mainframes, and thousands of agencies across states and localities rely on the systems.

Jennifer Nelson, Route Fifty

Fragmentation

The upper stage of a Zhuque-2E commercial rocket made by Chinese company LandSpace broke up in heavy traffic orbit, and anywhere from 100 to 150 pieces of debris are now in orbit between 208 miles and 263 miles up, at an inclination of 54.5 degrees to the equator. The debris might be a threat to Starlink satellites, which tend to be at that lower altitude. The good news is that most of the broken pieces will probably fall to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere within a few months.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

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Numlock News: June 15, 2026 • Knicks, Nets, The Alien

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Disclosure Day

Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day made $44 million at the domestic box office and another $48.9 million abroad for a global opening of $92.9 million, beating studio expectations and giving hope for a solid Spielberg-style hold for next week’s numbers. Director-driven high concepts have been a hit at the movies while franchise fare has faltered — Obsession and Backrooms have held strong, while Masters of the Universe and Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu have missed the mark — and it’s all come together in a domestic box office that is not only running 13 percent ahead of last year, but is also pacing just 3.4 percent behind the high-water mark year of 2019.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Knicks

The City of New York exorcised a half-century of ghosts with the first Knicks NBA Championship win in 53 years, a moment that sent the city into the streets and prompted local pillars of the numbers-newsletter community to get “why am I the admin of a groupchat called RIP DOWN THE CONGESTION PRICING CAMERAS AND MOVE THEM EVEN FURTHER UPTOWN” levels of drunk. The Knicks were a team uniquely constructed for this era of basketball and managed to deliver when it counted, finishing the playoffs with the single highest point per game differential compared to the regular season, a best-ever +14.9 points per game difference.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Hantavirus

Researchers studying the hantavirus outbreak that hit the cruise ship MV Hondius have identified a new lead in determining the origin of the Andes virus that hit the ship and prompted a global scare. While early reports pegged the likeliest vector on an excursion bird-watching trip to a landfill, genomic evidence about the virus strain, along with a reconstruction of the four-month road trip that preceded their cruise, indicate that the landfill may not be the source. Already it was a tough timeline; the incubation period of the virus is seven to 39 days, and patient zero developed a fever just five days after the excursion. The new theory is that the couple was exposed to the virus when they passed through Neuquén in their motor home 60 days before the cruise, potentially by picking up a stowaway rodent in the vehicle at that time.

Kai Kupferschmidt, Science

Japan

The total number of tourists to Japan is holding steady despite a major drop in visitors from China. In April, Japan welcomed 3.6 million visitors, down 5.5 percent year over year, but with new records for the number of visitors from South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and also France. That month saw a 56.8 percent year over year decline in visitors from China, which follows a diplomatic dust up between the two countries from six months ago related to Taiwan. Spending from Chinese visitors was down 50.4 percent; China accounted for 24 percent of total foreign visitor spending in 2025, but this year it’s down to 11.6 percent. This has led businesses that has previously catered to Chinese visitors to pivot.

Mayuko Kurihara, Nikkei Asia

Nets

A new analysis of insecticide-treated nets looked at 25 experimental studies assessing malaria incidence or malaria-related deaths and found that the nets are still very successful in combatting malaria. In Asia, ITNs were linked to a 68 percent decrease in malaria cases and an 18 percent decrease in related deaths, while in Africa, they cut cases by 29 percent to 40 percent. The somewhat wide variation in effectiveness indicates that while the nets may be a generally successfully and widely-applied solution, there could also be more complex factors related to mosquito diversity, insecticide resistance and overall compliance depending on the locatio of the studies.

Simon Wesson and Natasha Chen, Taylor & Francis Group

Potatoes

Archaeologist working at an Inca site found two rare 500-year-old freeze dried potatoes on the arid coast of southern Peru. They’re the only such potatoes found in more than a century. Potatoes have been grown in the Andes for thousands of years, and ancient Andeans developed a way to preserve potatoes where they exposed the root vegetables to mountain winter night frosts and then thawed them in the sun, repeating until they were chuño, a convenient freeze-dried source of calories that can last for years.

Sandee Oster, Phys.org

SPR

The United States has drawn 66 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of an authorized release of 172 million barrels. At the current rate, we’ll hit that sometime in early September, at which point the SPR will bring inventories to 243 million barrels, a historic low, down from a peak of 700 million barrels in 2009. Any deal to reopen traffic through the Strait of Hormuz would still need months to reverberate through the global energy economy, so that’s a substantial drawdown in reserves. Commercial stocks of oil are also being pushed to their limit; tanks need to have 10 percent to 15 percent capacity in storage to keep operations normal, and one storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma has drawn inventories down to 21 million barrels, a hair above its 20 million barrel limit.

Collin Eaton, Benoit Morenne, and Michael R. Gordon, The Wall Street Journal

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Numlock News: June 12, 2026 • Nurdle, Dead Pool, Cable

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Napster

In what must come as a shock to absolutely nobody, the oft-traded corporate corpse of music file-sharing service Napster has once again found its way into the legal system, with U.S. authorities accusing a North Carolina man of fraudulently obtaining an ownership stake in Napster by promising to invest $3.6 billion that he absolutely did not have. The indictment, unsealed yesterday, claims that over the course of 2024, the man obtained 239 million shares of Infinite Reality (a quarter of the shares) by pretending he had access to $55 billion in cash, of which $3 billion would be invested in the company. After purchasing the streamer for $207 million in March 2025, Infinite Reality changed its name to Napster. In 1999, Napster launched as a file sharing service that was legally speaking nuked from orbit by record companies; it was eventually sold to Rhapsody in 2011, then MelodyVR in 2020, then Hivemind Capital Partners and a crypto company called Algorand in 2022, then of course the 2025 acquisition by Infinite Reality, with the acquisition of Napster repeatedly serving as a canary-in-the-coal-mine for whenever a market niche has obviously passed its top.

Rachel Scharf, Billboard

Nurdles

In 2025, the MSC Elsa 3 sank 15 miles off the coast of southern India, and while the 13 overboarded containers of hazardous materials were a problem, it’s the 70,000 bags of nurdles on deck that were one of the most diabolical issues. Nurdles are the raw materials used in plastic manufacturing, bean-sized blobs that are melted in the course of making larger plastic items, and only 7,920 of the 71,540 bags on MSC Elsa were recovered. The remaining 1.6 million kilograms of tiny nurdles subsequently washed ashore, resulting in a beach where researchers are still finding 1,500 to 3,500 pellets per square meter of beach.

Kamal Thiagarajan, bioGraphic

Dead Pool

The Glen Canyon Dam is in trouble, as the Colorado River reservoir at Lake Powell has been taxed by decades of drought, and this summer will be a trying one for the dam. At full pool, Lake Powell’s surface reaches 3,700 feet of elevation, a level not reached since 1998. At 3,590 feet, it’s considered at Fish Pool, the minimum level Powell needs to keep smallmouth bass from getting downstream, which is a problem for native fish down there. We are well past that minimum: Currently, Powell is at 3,528 feet. At 3,370 feet, Powell is at Dead Pool, below which the river outlets literally cannot be used and no water can pass through Glen Canyon. At 3,500 feet, the Bureau of Reclamation declares de facto Dead Pool, where the agency will begin to halt releases, expecting downstream impacts and instability to both power and water supply.

Jonathan Thompson, High Country News

Cable

According to a new MoffettNathanson analysis, the number of subscriptions to bundled television came in at 40.9 million subs, down 9.7 percent compared to 45.3 million subs in the same period last year, and down 20.3 percent from Q1 of 2024. Since March 2020, major providers have shed 48.7 percent of their video customers, losing 38.8 million households, and when you go back a decade, that’s a loss of 57.1 million bundled subscriptions since Q1 of 2016. When counting in gains made by vMVPDs (like YouTubeTV, Sling TV, Hulu and Fubo), the loss is a little less grisly, as 62.2 million homes now subscribe to some kind of video service. Still, that’s a loss of 27.5 million homes cutting all ties with pay TV since 2020.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Climate

The latest Indicators of Global Climate Change report has been published in Earth System Science Data, the efforts of a team of over 70 scientists from 56 institutions across 17 countries. It found that human activities pushed global warming to 1.37 C in 2025, and that Earth will surpass 1.5C in about four years. Global greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high as of 2024, reaching 56.8 billion tons of CO2 equivalents.

University of Leeds

Scale

While the United States and France are the leaders in the global nuclear power industry, with the most and second-most in the world, China is getting serious about nuclear power and has been able to scale its fleet, and fast. In 2024, the average time it took to build a new reactor in China was five to seven years, compared to a global average of nine years and a recent U.S. average of 15 years. The reason is that in much of the world, every nuclear reactor has been a special unique snowflake, custom from beginning to end, while China set about standardizing the process and setting up a uniform project management system, even going so far as to build them in batches of six or more at a time.

Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review

Deep Space Network

The Artemis I mission four years ago caused issues for NASA’s Deep Space Network, which is a global array of antennas that communicate with far-flung spacecraft and which was diverted away from those science missions and towards the uncrewed moon mission. The situation articulated just how in-demand the DSN is, with currently about 40 missions relying on the antennas in California, Spain, and Australia. Every time one of NASA’s missions outlives its original intended mission, it adds a burden to the DSN, and over the next 10 years, another 40 missions are projected to need the DSN. The system needs help: Last year, one of the three antennas in California was damaged while tracking the Juno spacecraft near Jupiter. It’s been inoperable ever since and will cost $4.1 million to $4.6 million to repair.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

A little FiveThirtyEight reunion in the Sunday edition this week as I spoke to Neil Paine about the current moment sports. We covered the NBA finals — exciting stuff for your local Queens resider — The Stanley Cup and the World Cup all in one go. You can find him at Neil’s Substack for daily updates on all things sports data, his Sherwood newsletter Scoreboard diving into prediction markets, and you can find him in your ear with his NASCAR podcast, Podracing.

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Correction: An earlier version of this piece listed an incorrect volume of fuel oil.

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Numlock News: June 11, 2026 • Board Games, Tungsten, Whales

By Walt Hickey

Take A W

The United States and its allies have been largely weaned off Chinese exports of the metal tungsten, which is essential for making ultrahard tools as well as used in semiconductors, electronics and weapons. China has an 80 percent market share for the metal, and has begun to cut off countries aligned with the United States; Japan, for instance, has not imported any Chinese tungsten since February. And while the United States’ last domestic tungsten mining operation ended in 2015, tungsten is still being extracted — not from mines underground but from old garages and scrapyards, with U.S. tungsten scrap now selling for a premium. Tungsten scrap that was going for $40 per pound a year ago hit $167.50 per pound in May thanks to surging demand from allies, with Japan, for instance, importing 1.72 million kilograms of tungsten scrap from the U.S. in the first quarter, a large spike compared to the 2.2 million kilograms imported over all of last year.

Azusa Kawakami, Shunsuke Akagi and Kohei Fujimura, Nikkei Asia

Bikes

Protected bike lanes that physically separate and protect cyclists from motorists go a long way towards incentivizing bike use compare to bike lanes that are just painted on to the asphalt, a new analysis of 72 million Citi Bike trips recorded from 2013 to 2024 found. According to the analysis, adding in any kind of bike lane does promote bike use, but the increase is much more pronounced when the integrity of the bike lane doesn’t just rely on the kindness and generosity of motorists: Citi Bike stations near painted bike lanes and sharrows saw an increase in usage of about 14 percent, while those near newly installed protected bike lanes saw an average increase of 18 percent, good for an additional 379 rides per station per month.

NYU Tandon School of Engineering

Pave Paradise

Risk of flooding in the United Kingdom has increased because people are installing hardscapes into their gardens, with impervious surfaces adding up. Gardens are about five percent of the total land area of Britain, and in London, they’re 41 percent of the land. The total area in England that is defined as permeable enough to absorb rain declined by 173,000 acres from 2001 to 2022. Garden design is an element of that, especially in urban areas, and as paving slabs became a trendy way of making low-maintenance gardens, they’ve made some areas of London more flood-prone.

Olivia Rudgard, Bloomberg

Nostalgia

Food trends have turned decisively nostalgic, with formats and flavors that had long gone out of style making a comeback. For instance, creamsicle flavors are appearing on menus 37 percent more than they had been four years ago, with other phased-out flavors like baked Alaska and ice cream floats also appearing more and more on menus. Some of this is just the industry exploiting the trend cycle; while a dirty martini or frozen yogurt may come off as dated to those who were around for the initial go-round, they sure seem just as new and interesting as chili crisp or Dubai chocolate to a Gen Z consumer who weren’t around the first time.

Deena Shanker, Bloomberg

Cones of Dunshire

A new survey probed how Americans felt about board games, finding that we are a competitive people, with 44 percent of respondents indicating that it’s at least somewhat important to win when one plays a board game. That’s compared to a mysterious eight percent who said it’s “not at all important” if they win. When it comes to which games people play, the classics tend to win out, with Monopoly (81 percent have played at least several times), Checkers (76 percent) and Scrabble (64 percent) coming in as the most-played. Getting deeper into the shelf, 23 percent said they had played Risk at least several times and 25 percent Backgammon; plunging deeper into the specialty board game store crowd, just nine percent had played Catan a few times, eight percent Ticket To Ride and six percent Wingspan.

David Montgomery, YouGov

Marriage

The percentage of people who told the General Social Survey that their marriage is “very happy” has slipped from 67 percent in the late 1980s to 61 percent as of 2024, with a decisive slide following the pandemic. From 1987 to 2013, several relationship dynamics have changed among both married couples and those who cohabitate, with reported levels of fairness within the relationship declining somewhat over the period, the level of disagreement up slightly and the level of interaction sloping downward. One cause of this cited by researchers is people working longer hours in order to make ends meet.

Alvin Chang, The Pudding

Whalefall

A new study published in Nature describes a fascinating undersea site, the largest whale graveyard ever found, a place that spans over 740 miles of seafloor containing at least 485 whale skeletons from across five million years. The Diamantina Fracture Zone extends from the southwestern tip of Australia to the Indian Ocean, and over the course of about 30 dives in the region, researchers kept on finding whale skeletons; 33 fossil samples were dated between 5.26 million and 120,000 years old, preserved thanks to slow sediment accumulation. This has made for a site with a whale-remains density reaching up to 759.5 individuals per square kilometer, indicating that there may be 10 million whale carcasses down there.

Chinese Academy of Sciences and Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

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