Numlock News: August 4, 2026 • Hesperaloe, Railroad Valley, Beef

By Walt Hickey

Fiber

Kimberly-Clark relies on wood fiber for most of its core products, from Scott paper towels to Huggies diapers to Cottonelle toilet paper, and after years of R&D, the company is prepared to reveal what it believes may be a future source of fiber: hesperaloe. In early tests, the plant’s fibers have been capable of swapping in for wood fiber in those paper products, and the fibers are both stronger and softer at that, not to mention less environmentally damaging. With 30 patents on the plant, and $250 million in R&D over 20 years, Kimberly-Clark considers it the viable alternative to wood fiber that bamboo and recycled paper have not entirely panned out to be.

Natasha Khan, The Wall Street Journal

Ticked Off

Ticks have become a serious public health risk, with ticks and Lyme increasingly discussed in public health circles with the same tone that mosquitoes and malaria once were. Those pests were at one point the target of a successful eradication campaign in North America that eventually led to the CDC, and a serious campaign would now subject ticks to the same level of control. However, that would probably involve killing lots and lots of deer: The deer population has rebounded without any real predators, and at any given season, a single deer can feed 1,500 female deer ticks, which can lay 2,000 eggs, good for producing three million deer ticks per deer over one breeding season. Hunting is good for reducing the density of deer down from 70 to 40 per square mile, but to break the disease transmission cycle you’d have to get down to less than 10.

Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic

Danube

Romania is addressing its serious climate-change issues sensibly, by exploding them. The military detonated a rock formation in the Danube River that — amid a serious drought — had been preventing water from getting to the country’s sole nuclear power plant. This required 180 kilograms of explosives. The low level of the Danube has caused problems at energy facilities all along the river’s considerable length; in Hungary, the government had to shut down most of the power generation at a 2,000 megawatt nuclear power station because of the low water levels.

Irina Vilcu and Andra Timu, Bloomberg

Endowment

The fundamental rule of managing a financial endowment for an institution is that you do not touch the principal amount and live only off the interest. The situation at a number of small, private colleges is getting sufficiently bad that many are indeed spending restricted endowments just to keep the lights on. Almost 200 private colleges tapped into restricted endowments in 2025, up from 131 schools that had to do so in 2021. Overall, the percentage of private nonprofit colleges drawing on endowments at a rate of more than seven percent was up to 19.3 percent in 2025, up from just 9.7 percent in 2016.

Douglas Belkin, The Wall Street Journal

Beef

Meat consumption dropped 2 percent by volume in June year over year, with processed meat sales down 5 percent. Processed lunch meat was down 9 percent, frankfurters were down 8 percent, and bacon was down 6 percent. Beef, which is pricey, dropped 2 percent and veal sales were down 12 percent; both of those categories saw 12 percent inflation year over year.

Sam Silverstein, Food Dive

NASA

The critical mineral miner 3 Proton Lithium has set its eyes on a remote site in the Great Basin Desert in eastern Nevada, which has been assessed as containing 1.78 million tons of tungsten. That would be worth $152 billion based on the current (very high!) prices for the metal, and would also be five times larger than the next largest tungsten deposit in the United States. There is a problem, though: Lots of that tungsten is in lands reserved for NASA to calibrate Earth-observing satellites. Basically, a 92 square kilometer region of Railroad Valley has been used for over three decades by satellites to calibrate their precise location. Because the dry lake bed has a consistent color, it’s easily visible from space, undisturbed and free of vegetation and basically an ideal featureless landscape to calibrate optical instruments on Landsat and other satellites.

Adam Kovac, Scientific American and Jamie Smyth, Financial Times

Pyrogeomorphology

An unfortunate issue that can happen after a wildfire is that burned lands are subsequently very susceptible to mudslides and other debris flows, like the ones seen in Colorado just a few weeks ago. There are 21.8 million Americans who live within thre miles of where a fire has burned in the past two decades, double the number from 2000. In California, researchers project that changing atmospheric temperatures may result in rainfall intensity increases of 18 percent, which in turn will lead to a 110 percent increase in the probability of a major debris flow.

Jen Pierce, The Conversation

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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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