Numlock News: April 21, 2026 • Bad Bunny, Moonshot, Mollusks

Apr 21, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Rain

Superstar artist Bad Bunny had three sold-out shows in Medellin scheduled, but with just days to go, heavy rains appeared on the horizon, threatening the production. With about 145,500 tickets sold across the three shows — a box office gate of $23.7 million, not to mention the food and beverage sales that may come — and given the incredibly tight timeline, Bad Bunny’s management team turned to a fascinating niche of the insurance industry willing to write a policy to insure against a washout. A transatlantic team of insurers devised a workaround of how to actually trigger the policy by installing a temporary weather station within the stadium and hammering out a bespoke policy that would trigger should rainfall exceed a certain amount or pass certain payout thresholds. The actual coverage amount has not been revealed, but Descartes Underwriting SAS, the Paris-based underwriter, has said that insurance can ordinarily provide up to $80 million worth of coverage for this kind of weather risk.

Joe Wertz and Mary Hui, Bloomberg

Well, Damn

While many oil wells in Texas can produce on the order of hundreds of barrels of oil per day, lots and lots of the wells within the state are barely producing any oil, and seem to be operating well below a threshold of viability because the cost of plugging a well is slightly higher than pumping a mostly dry one. About 99,000 wells in Texas — two-thirds of active wells — produce under 10 barrels of oil a day. In order to remain “active,” an oil well must produce just five barrels for three consecutive months, or at least one barrel over 12 consecutive months — both minimums set by state regulators. Those metrics have become targets for producers who don’t want to deal with the consequences of joining the 159,000 inactive wells in the state, which would require pricey decommissioning. This can cause enormous headaches for the people who live near the wells that, by all rights, should have been plugged years ago.

Martha Pskowski, Inside Climate News

Dice

A new study published in American Antiquity describes 565 objects from across North America — all around the West and even dating to as far back as 12,000 years ago — as dice, which pushes back the timeline for evidence of human play by thousands of years. The findings indicate that Indigenous Americans were playing games 6,000 years earlier than anyone else on record. These pieces are mostly binary — resembling marked coins rather than six-sided dice — but could indicate that dice are possibly older than coins.

Aris Politopoulos, Angus Moi, and Walter Crist, The Conversation

Voyager

NASA has shut off one of the three remaining scientific instruments onboard the space probe Voyager 1 in order to save power following an unexpected drop in energy levels observed in February. The spacecraft is currently 15.78 billion miles away from Earth and is traveling at 51,000 miles per hour. The experiment that has been shut down is the Low-Energy Charged Particles experiment, which measured ions, electrons and cosmic rays, informing scientific understanding about pressure fronts within the interstellar medium. The remaining two instruments still working on Voyager 1 is the magnetometer and its plasma wave subsystem, and given its current power supply, NASA expects both instruments can continue operating this way for about a year.

Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

Greek

A new analysis of the family names of all the 773 mollusk varieties found a somewhat funny bias in the naming of snails, clams and octopuses, specifically a bias towards giving them ancient Greek names rather than Latin ones. The study attributes this in part to a trend among 19th-century European scientists — a class of people who did a whole lot of the naming of molluscan animals — attempting to show off their high levels of education, according to the study published in Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Indeed, words derived from Ancient Greek makes up 71.8 percent of all of the family names of mollusks, with just 26.1 percent coming from Latin and 6.3 percent coming from eponyms (named after individuals). That last figure is particularly low compared to other taxa like birds or mammals, where discoverers like to name new animals after their colleagues or countrymen anywhere from 15 percent to 40 percent of the time.

University of Tokyo

Fungi

There are large, widespread networks of interconnected microbes that are tied together thanks to network-forming mycorrhizal fungi that facilitate their spread and connection. The western part of the United States is pretty rich in these kinds of subterranean ecosystems — it’s home to about five percent of all of the world’s ectomycorrhizal fungi hotspots — which can form symbiotic relationships with trees and shrubs across forests. A new atlas produced by the delightfully named Society for the Protection of Underground Networks estimates that 90 percent of mycorrhizal biodiversity hotspots are not within protected areas, leaving them vulnerable to destruction. With mycorrhizal fungi storing 13 billion tons of carbon, this destruction could have serious and global ramifications.

Kylie Mohr, High Country News

Moonshot

Fresh off the success of the Artemis II mission, new concerns about the timeline of the Artemis IV mission — which would return to the Moon’s surface — have emerged. The particular logjam is about the spacesuits, which have been controversially delegated to a contractor rather than developed in-house at NASA. The current space suits, the ones in use on space walks on the ISS, have received no major updates in the last two decades. The mission currently scheduled for 2028 would entail using new space suits provided by Axion Space under a maximum $3.1 billion contract. The Office of the Inspector General at NASA has warned that if Axiom’s work encounters more delays, the suits might not be available until 2031.

Claire Cameron, Scientific American

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