Numlock News: August 31, 2026 • Echidna, Acme, Gas Scorpio

Aug 31, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Meep Meep

Coyote vs. Acme brought in $15.4 million domestically in North America, the largest debut ever for independent distributor Ketchup Entertainment, which bought the film from Warner Bros. after the studio attempted to write it off for tax purposes. Still, that was not enough to surpass Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which made $22.2 million domestically, and with $891.5 million domestic so far, it is still a contender to beat Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens for the top all-time domestic box office. With $2.332 billion globally, it’s now in fourth place for the top global cume ever.

Ryan Gajewski, The Hollywood Reporter

Tankers

There are 14 ships waiting near the Panama Canal with 115 on schedule to transit. There’s an eight-day maximum wait for those unscheduled ships to get north (from the Pacific to the Atlantic) and a four-day delay to go south. The wait is worse for the Neopanamax-sized vessels, and some have gone so far as to offload their cargo onto narrower Panamax tankers which have been getting through their locks faster. The traffic is so bad that Gas Scorpio, a supertanker, is actually just going around South America instead; it’s currently off the coast of Chile.

Nicholas Lua, Bloomberg

Monotreme

Echidnas are one of the egg-laying mammals known as monotremes, and researchers at Macquarie University in Sydney are celebrating after pulling off the first-ever baby echidna to be born and reared in a research environment. The echidnas have been hard to breed in captivity, which has thwarted attempts to form a dedicated research colony. The echidna puggle is the first born at a university and belongs to T. aculeatus, one of the five known species of monotremes. The puggle weighed 36 grams after its first weighing.

James Woodford, New Scientist

Exploding Sunroof

The sunroofs of automobiles have been spontaneously exploding at a consistently rising pace this year, with 498 reports of sunroofs exploding or shattering, which would set us up for a record 2026; in 2025, there were 550 reported incidents, up from 350 in 2021. According to drivers and testers, a common culprit is unnoticed road debris, as well as hot temperatures and defects. The failures are happening across all makes and models, with 17 automakers and over 200 models appearing in the data set.

Ryan Felton, The Wall Street Journal

GoPro

YouTube impresario Mark Fischbach, known online as Markiplier, made waves by buying up an 8.5 percent stake in the camera company GoPro, which has been on a losing streak lately amid international competition in the camera market. Fischbach earlier this year released a self-funded feature film, his directorial debut Iron Lung, which made $51 million on a budget of $3 million. Evidently, GoPro cameras were instrumental in creating the behind-the-scenes content for the film. He got interested in the hardware, and after being denied a look at their next camera, he simply began buying up stock in the company until they essentially had to let him.

Lucas Shaw, Bloomberg

Distracted

New research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety argues that we are drastically undercounting the number of accidents that stem from distracted driving and smartphone use, based on anonymized cellphone data from Cambridge Mobile Telematics — which had data on cellphone activity before and after collisions. According to that data, drivers on the platform were using their cellphones in the 30 seconds prior to impact in seven percent of single-vehicle crashes and eight percent of two-vehicle crashes. Police reports for those same crashes only recorded cellphone use in under one percent of the crashes, indicating that analyses of distracted driving based on police reports could be seriously undercounting the true frequency of phone use.

Joe Young, IIHS

Telescope

The Nancy Grace Roman telescope has launched and is now embarking on a 100-day journey to the L2 Lagrange point beyond the Moon. It will have a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble, can survey the sky 1,000 times faster and has a 300-megapixel infrared camera as well as a Coronagraph system that can mask glare from stars in an attempt to image exoplanets directly. NASA believes that it will be able to discover exoplanets on the order of tens of thousands, and perhaps even more.

Terrence O’Brien, The Verge and Grace Eliza Goodwin, BBC News

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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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