Numlock News: August 24, 2026 • Dance, Thunderquake, El Niño

Aug 24, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Spider-Man

With another $39 million domestic, at $854.9 million, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now the No. 3 highest-grossing film at the domestic box office, and with $2.22 billion worldwide, it is now at No. 6 on the international chart, beating Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens. It could be just days until it hops the next two spots on that list, as it’s well within striking distance of No. 5 Titanic ($2.26 billion) and No. 4 Ne Zha 2 ($2.27 billion). The box office is doing pretty dang good right now, with 2026 now outpacing 2025 by 20.4 percent; this summer’s box office is at $4.444 billion domestic, which is not all that far off from the all-time high for the season, which was 2013’s $4.75 billion.

Ryan Gajewski, The Hollywood Reporter

DED

LIV Golf is the PGA Tour-alternative that blossomed during the period of time in which Saudi Arabia found it geopolitically useful to buy up or fund sports leagues with the money derived from the ocean of oil underneath the country. Now that that’s over — and the difficulty of actually selling that oil significantly thanks to the difficulties in the Strait of Hormuz — the PIF yanked its funding in April, coincidentally one month after the war with Iran began. LIV now appears to be on its last legs, one gimme putt away from oblivion, screwing over contractors on the way down. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund put more than $5 billion into LIV, yet now LIV is being sued for just over $1 million by a video clip company they hired and didn’t pay. The purse for the individual competition in this weekend’s tournament at Chatham Hills, Indiana, spontaneously became a season finale, with the prize cut down from $20 million to $10.1 million. According to a person familiar with the matter, the winners of the previous tournament have also not been paid.

Andrew Beaton, The Wall Street Journal

FORSEE

Researchers were able to use a technique called distributed acoustic sensing to use an ordinary fiber optic cable as an underground vibration sensor using a two-mile-long cable — an old telecom cable — with 2,100 sensors on it. They wanted to track thunderquakes, which are seismic waves that occur when sound from the atmosphere interacts with the ground. Over the course of two years, researchers were able to use this clever and unique instrument to record and identify 458 clear thunderquakes.

Nolan Roth and Tieyuan Zhu, The Conversation

Face Lift Off

A new study of 115 NASA photographs of 13 astronauts found that the lower eyelid discernibly rises while a person is in space thanks to the lack of gravity. The distance from the corneal center to the lower eyelid margin decreased by 1.0 millimeters in microgravity, from an average of 4.9 millimeters while grasped by the surly bonds of Earth to 3.9 millimeters in space. The effect was seen in 62 percent of the astronauts and was highly consistent between eyes.

Rong Xie, Higher Education Press

Dance, Dance, Revolution

Dance music is having a moment back in the mainstream, with the dance and electronic category up 18.9 percent year over year during the first half of 2026, the highest growth of any genre. What’s neat is that it’s not just one particular hit driving the growth, but rather a cohort of acts with big album releases that have found mainstream success, including John Summit, Illenium and Slayyyter, with the three albums from those artists combining for 416,900 equivalent album units. All told, dance music is 4.23 percent of the U.S. music industry.

Katie Bain, Billboard

Skillcation

The travel industry, always good for trendspotting, has begun to track the “skillcation” trend, which is when tourists specifically pursue a trip in order to learn a new skill like surfing or beekeeping or climbing. It’s not exactly a new trend — any card-carrying PADI diver can attest to the unique thrill of it— according to data from Mastercard, which tracks travel trends closely; 48 percent of people are planning a trip this year to specifically develop a skill.

Sarah Rappaport, Bloomberg

Canal

Concerns about shipping things through the Red Sea have sent more ships through the Panama Canal than usual, but it’s coming at the worst possible moment, with a likely stronger-than-usual El Niño pattern already causing additional concerns around the water levels in Lake Gatún, the reservoir that supplies the water for the locks. The canal authority has plans to cut the maximum draught for neo-panamax transits to 48 feet on August 26 and then to 47.5 feet on September 3. The queue to pass through the canal is getting worse, with 112 vessels awaiting entrance to the canal. The price to hop the line through one of the three to five “queue-jump slots” was selling for $135,000 to $140,000 before the Iran War; one sold for $4.6 million last week. The El Niño has an 81 percent chance of being “very strong,” according to forecasters.

The Loadstar

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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