Numlock News: August 20, 2026 • Sagittarius A*, Bluefin Tuna, Columbia House

Aug 20, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Box Lunch

Several meal kit companies are facing serious issues following the closure of a major supplier. Customers of Blue Apron and Marley Spoon report missing ingredients and failed deliveries because FreshRealm, the company actually responsible for making the meal kits, filed for bankruptcy and sold that part of its business to Misfits Markets. FreshRealm went under after Walmart ended its deal following a listeria outbreak, and with Walmart accounting for about 20 percent of the company’s revenue, it was curtains for the company. Blue Apron’s struggles have reflected issues across the entire meal kit space, which is experiencing a come-down after a boom; the company IPO’d at $1.9 billion in 2017, but was sold to Wonder for $103 million in 2023.

Sarah Nassauer, The Wall Street Journal

Columbia House

Membership brand Columbia House is shutting down after 71 years of operation, with the company behind the iconic “12 CDs for a penny” deal finally folding. First founded in 1955 as a direct-mail marketing program, it peaked at 16 million members in 1996, generating $1.4 billion in revenue. A recent attempt to pivot to Columbia House DVD Club in the wake of Napster and digital downloads generally wiping out its business did not take as hoped. Its legacy lives on; with Spotify paying $0.003 and $0.005 per stream on average, one penny for 12 albums is less an audacious entry offer and more the prevailing pricing strategy in music.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Swift

NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced that they are giving up on an audacious mission to save the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory from burning up in the atmosphere, as the Link satellite launched to save it cannot complete the mission as hoped. That mission was already considered high-risk, and its attempt is full of valuable lessons learned; Katalyst was given a $30 million contract under a year ago and tasked to build and launch the satellite, and in just nine months they managed to get a first-of-its-kind experimental satellite into orbit.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Fish

The 2027 quota for large bluefin tuna has been increased in the central and western Pacific Ocean from 11,869 tons in 2026 to 14,836 metric tons in 2027, while the quota for smaller tuna (under 30 kilograms) has been dropped from 5,125 to 4,823 tons. The agreement is the result of negotiations between 10 countries and regions with stakes in the tuna trade, and will still need to be agreed upon by all 26 countries and regions at a late November conference in Vanuatu.

Hajime Tsukada and Nozomu Ogawa, Nikkei Asia

Deus Ex Machina

A new study analyzed 2,034 paperback religious books available on Amazon, and flagged that approximately 63 percent of paperback religious books listed for sale were likely written by AI. All of the books had a four-star rating or higher. The commonality of AI text varied depending on the specific slice of the religious and spiritual spectrum; witchcraft (78 percent of texts flagged as likely AI), Hinduism (76 percent) and Taoism (74 percent) came in on the higher side, while Mormonism (42 percent), atheism (40 percent) and Satanism (22 percent) came in on the lower side. This is perhaps a sign that when given the prompt that “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” the robot can’t bring itself to crank out a book.

Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly

Seniors

America is greatly in need of more housing for seniors, whether that’s subsidized affordable housing for people on a fixed income, independent living with amenities needed for older adults or assisted living. The median age at which someone enters senior care is 84, and with the oldest baby boomers just turning 80, the number of Americans in their 80s is projected to double to 29.4 million by 2045. The immediate need is clear: 582,000 more units by 2030. There’s one significant bloc standing in the way of more housing for seniors, and it is, ironically, seniors, who are consistently the most significant and organized opposition to new development and affordable housing in communities where they own homes.

Charley Locke, Bloomberg

Star

The fastest known star in the Milky Way galaxy is S301, which was detected by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and is close to the four-million-Solar-mass black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*. The star orbits the black hole and gets as close as just 12 astronomical units away, or 12 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. That orbit takes just 8.7 years to complete, and at its closest passage to Sagittarius A*, S301 travels around eight percent of the speed of light. Because it’s so close to the black hole, getting as close as Saturn is to the Sun at its closest, S301may very well be used to measure the rotational speed of Sagittarius A*.

Bárbara Ferreira, ESO

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