Numlock News: April 10, 2026 • El Niño, Onkalo, Lystrosaurus

Apr 10, 2026

By Walt Hickey

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ALL ONE!

Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, the idiosyncratic indie soap maker that makes organic soap in an iconic bottle with a bit of a manifesto printed on the label, is doing great. The company has grown from about $17 million in annual revenue two decades ago to making about $250 million annually. Sales have grown in all but a single year since 1997, and the company’s continued devotion to environmental and social causes has remained persistent even as other firms have chickened out or walked back principles, with the kind of full-throated devotion to fair trade and caps on executive compensation that would make other executives wither. As recently as 2023, an activist group called for a boycott over Dr. Bronner’s continued support for gender-affirming care; that year, revenue rose 17 percent.

Hanna Krueger, The Wall Street Journal

“Grass”

America is installing a whole lot of synthetic turf, which is made from plastic and tire waste. In 2001, the country installed seven million square meters of synthetic turf, a figure that stood at 79 million square meters as of 2024, with the installed mass of turf rising from 11,000 metric tons to 120,000 metric tons. That is a concern to some; when normal grass suffers erosion, dirt moves into a river, big whoop; however, as turf washes away, shredded tire matter makes its way into waterways. One 2023 study found that 15 percent of medium-sized and microplastic particles in a river outside of Barcelona came from artificial turf, and in 2020, the European Chemicals Agency estimated that the tire-derived infill was contributing 16,000 tons of microplastics a year to the environment. The appeal is that fake fields are just that much more durable and year-round; a natural grass field is usable for a total of 800 hours per year at most, while an artificial turf field can sustain 3,000 hours of use.

Douglas Main, MIT Technology Review

El Niño

Severe El Niño drought conditions from 2023 to 2024 forced the Panama Canal to cut daily transits down to 24 vessels per day, and it was only a shift to La Niña conditions that facilitated the increase back to 36 daily transits in 2025, with the critical Lake Gatun reaching near maximum capacity in early 2026. The latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is that El Niño will emerge in mid-2026 and last through the rest of the year, with the agency looking at a 25 percent chance of a very strong El Niño that would hike the likelihood of canal disruptions. It’s times like these that I want to give a big shout out to the Strait of Malacca between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra for evidently being the only normal bottleneck in the dang world; while the Strait of Hormuz falls to chaos and the Panama Canal can barely keep the water flowing and the Suez Canal gets jammed up by the Ever Given, it’s times like these that we have to give it up to Malacca for just keeping the global economy humming.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Books

A 2005 survey found that 64 percent of American adults reported they had read a print book in the past 12 months, down from 72 percent in 2011. The percentage who said they had read an e-book increased from 17 percent to 31 percent over the same period, while the percentage who had listened to an audiobook increased from 11 percent to 26 percent. Overall, 75 percent of Americans said they had read a book in any format in the past 12 months, with women being seven percentage points more likely to say as much.

William Bishop, Pew Research Center

This Place Is Not A Place Of Honor

Finland will soon open the first facility for the permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel, the product of years of construction and digging into 1.9-billion-year-old bedrock. The site, Onkalo, saw construction begin in 2004 on an island near to the country’s five nuclear reactors and was built to store 6,500 tons of spent nuclear fuel. A 1994 Act required Finland’s radioactive waste to be permanently disposed of within Finland rather than exported. A 2022 report from the International Atomic Energy Agency puts the global total at 400,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel produced since the '50’s, with about a third of that being recycled and the rest of it temporarily stored inside casks or pools, often near reactors. Another country, Sweden began building a similar repository last year and is slated to open in the 2030s, but France is yet to begin construction on its own planned facility.

James Brooks and Stephanie Liechtenstein, The Associated Press

Eggs

A new study published in PLOS ONE describes compelling evidence that Lystrosaurus, which was an ancestor of mammals that survived the End-Permian Mass Extinction 250 million years ago, laid eggs. The eggs were likely soft-shelled, which made it more difficult to find fossilized extant remains of the eggs. But a specimen discovered in a 2008 field expedition that appeared to be a curled-up hatchling was studied with new X-ray CT and the bright X-rays, revealing delicate bones — not even fused yet — in the tight package of a juvenile Lystrosaurus still in an egg.

Wits University

Life Finds A Way

In 2024 in Florida, entomologists discovered wild termites that were hybrids of the two of the most destructive species in the worlds, the Asian subterranean termite and the Formosan termite. This fully-established colony of hybrids is a problem, because the two species cause about $20 billion in damage globally every year, and while there are ways to address infestations of either, a hybrid is a whole new ball game. For many years, the very definition of a “species” was based on the idea that it couldn’t successfully mate with members of other species, but this kind of inter-species encounters are becoming more and more common based on careful readings of the biological literature, entomological studies, AO3 and new reports based on genetic testing. Hybrids are much more common than originally understood; a quarter of carnivores have genes from multiple lineages, as do 40 percent of plant families, and global trade and ecosystem disruption is making that cross-pollination more possible.

Ute Eberle, bioGraphic

Refer a friend

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to David Montgomery over at YouGov, who also writes YouGov America’s newsletter, The Surveyor. David recently wrote Which proverbs do Americans find wise? We had a great chat about some of the more interesting crosstabs of his story, David can be found at YouGov, YouGov America’s newsletter and a cool podcast called The Siècle, where he discusses 19th-century France.

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.

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