Numlock News: August 27, 2026 • UFO, LCD, ERCOT

Aug 27, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Texas

After several years of close calls, Texas’ power grid has had an incredibly boring summer for once, and it’s thanks to battery and solar installations. Texas’ grid has notched several generation records — highest load ever at 91,308 megawatts on July 22, maximum battery discharge on Sunday at 13,256 megawatts — and not once has ERCOT had to issue a conservation appeal, which is when a company asks customers to voluntarily reduce electricity consumption. Those appeals often needed to go out in the late afternoon and early evening when solar tends to taper off, but thanks to battery storage that’s no longer as much of a problem spot. Average electricity bills in the state were $252 per month in July, up only 2.3 percent year over year, and rates were flat at 16 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Matthew Zeitlin, Heatmap

Panama Canal

Auctions to hop the growing line at the Panama Canal are getting intense, with even more back-to-back records. One slot sold for $5.3 million on Monday, beating Friday’s record of $4.6 million; before the Iran War, these were selling for $135,000 to $140,000. Ordinarily, there might be two or three bidders a day for those slots; at peak, there were 18 bidders. As vessels avoid the troubles transiting the Middle East and as some fuel carriers aim instead for the Gulf of Mexico’s ports to deposit oil, the number of vessels without an appointment to transit the Panama Canal has increased from about 10 percent of queued ships to 20 percent to 25 percent.

Lori Ann LaRocco, gCaptain

Oceans

Enceladus, the moon of Saturn, has a shell of ice surrounding a liquid water ocean. One particularly awesome feature of the moon is the Tiger Stripes, which are four enormous cracks that cut across its south pole, looking almost like it was scratched by a claw. These fissures are massive —500 meters deep, two kilometers across, 130 kilometers long — and of mysterious origin. Previous research suggested that they were created by tectonic fracturing of the ice shell. However, new research published in AGU Advances simulated the movement of the water underneath the ice shell given the irregular orbit of Enceladus around Saturn and the known tidal effects. It found that if there was one initial fissure, that process could have produced additional parallel fissures roughly 35 kilometers apart, which is indeed the observed spacing of the Tiger Stripes.

Sarah Stanley, Eos

UFO

According to a new survey from Gallup, 49 percent of Americans think that all UFO sightings can be explained by human activity or natural phenomena, while 37 percent said that at least some may have been attributable to alien visitors. Perhaps more significantly, more Americans than ever before reported having seen a UFO, with 17 percent of respondents saying they themselves have seen something that they thought was a UFO, up from 16 percent in 2019, 12 percent in 1996 and nine percent in 1978.

Megan Brenan, Gallup

Cash

A new survey found that 42 percent of Americans make none of their purchases in cash in a given week, up substantially from the 24 percent who said as much in 2015. The fraction who make all or almost all of their transactions in cash is down by half, from 24 percent in 2015 to 12 percent in 2026. Overall, 46 percent of Americans are carrying cash on them all or most of the time, while 32 percent say they rarely or never have cash. This obviously conflicts with independent research conducted in New York City a little before the closing time of the bar, where zero percent of people from whom I asked for five dollars happened to be carrying any cash.

Michelle Faverio and Eugenie Park, Pew Research Center

Televisions

Big screen televisions are in a boom market right now thanks to falling screen prices and increasing memory prices. This year, sales of LCD televisions 70 inches or bigger are expected to hit 30.11 million units, up from 16.74 million units in 2022. The LCD panels that constitute a substantial chunk of production costs are getting cheaper: The large-volume transaction price of a 75-inch LCD panel is down 70 percent over the past decade to $239 per panel as of 2026. Meanwhile, 85-inch LCD panels are down 60 percent to $310 per panel. One thing making larger televisions somewhat more appealing to consumers is, ironically, a component getting more expensive. Every modern television contains DRAM for short-term data storage, and the AI boom has made DRAM very expensive and in shortage. Thing is, though, every television has DRAM in it, and for smaller televisions, it’s a much larger chunk of the cost of producing them; for a 32-inch set, the circuit board is 37 percent of component costs, but on a 75-inch set, it’s 20 percent. That means that even though DRAM is getting pricier, the impact on the component cost of smaller sets is significantly higher than on the larger sets, where more of the production cost is in the LCD screen itself.

Hitomi Izawa, Nikkei Asia

Bugs

A new study published in Nature reexamined four fossils found in Illinois, Texas and Scotland and goes on to argue that many-legged organisms may have been the ancestors of modern-day six-legged insects. The ancestors of insects are believed to be seagoing crustaceans that eventually made it to land, and the specimens analyzed in this study — one 324-million-year-old fossil found in Texas, a 405-million-year-old fossil from Scotland and two from Illinois that are about 100 million years younger — all had more legs than the typical six that insects have, which could have allowed them to split time between land and the water. The Texas sample, named Chosha praecursor, had three pairs of walking legs, an 11-segmented rear, an egg-laying tube and unbranched antennae, which are all by-the-book insect traits. The multiple pairs of legs on its rear, though, were decisively crustacean, indicating that this may have been a precursor of insects that was yet to lose its paddling appendages for life in the water.

Elizabeth Pennisi, Science

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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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