Numlock News: August 5, 2026 • Carnivorous Plants, Lost Explosives, Gazpacho

Aug 05, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Games

The video game business can be a difficult one, but it’s reassuring to know that first-time developers are able to take their ideas and build a loyal following. For instance, a teenager from New Hampshire launched This Game Costs $10, and seeing the potential in the format and realizing that the maximum price in the Steam store is $200, followed it up with This Game Costs $200. Within a short time, thousands of Steam users in China actually bought the game, resulting in $1.3 million in revenue. That money quickly evaporated when the players realized the game was phoned-in junk and were overwhelmingly refunded, but at the end of the day the developer still made $2,000 from the at least 10 people who thought it was worth spending $200 on a joke.

Patricia Hernandez, Polygon

Gotta Make The Calendar

A new study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that any municipality that would like to stock their fire department with hunks need only to ensure that the person leading the fire department is themselves a hunk and also to ensure that the station crew’s leadership is appropriately staffed. More specifically, the researchers analyzed annual physical fitness test data from 838 firefighters across 99 fire stations and found that when a crew had a fit and actively engaged captain and lieutenants, the crew scored meaningfully higher on physical readiness tests. Furthermore, when only a captain led the crew with no lieutenants, the scores were significantly lower.

University of East London

Carnivores

A new study published in Nature confirms a theory floated by none other than Charles Darwin in 1875, that some species of plant from the genus of flowering alpine plants Saxifraga were likely carnivorous and consumed nutrients from insects trapped in their sticky glandular hairs. The modern researchers studied S. candelabrum, which is found on the Tibet Plateau, and found insect prey on the glandular hairs of 43 out of 45 surveyed specimens, with the mature plants averaging 71 trapped insects each. By using fluorescence tagging, it was determined that the plants can indeed potentially digest prey. Fruit flies were then labeled with a stable form of nitrogen and fed to the plants, and researchers found a commensurate increase in nitrogen levels.

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Pepsi

Pepsi is launching one of its most successful European products in the United States: gazpacho. PepsiCo owns Alvalle, which sells refrigerated gazpacho in cartons in Spain, Portugal, the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Russia. It was originally founded in Spain, where it is the most popular in the category and commands a 17 percent market share. Pepsi tends to sell most of its wares in the middle aisles of supermarkets, where the snacks and beverages are, and is aiming to get a foothold in the perimeter of grocery stores, which has outpaced the rest of the grocery business by 15 percent in 2025.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Blocking Out The Sun

A new study of the 2023 wildfires that hit forested regions of Canada found that the drifting smoke from those blazes was responsible for a three percent drop in solar power generation in not only the United States but also Europe. The generation drop cost $2 billion, of which $711 million was lost in the United States, and $1.17 billion was lost in Europe, mostly Germany.

Michael Le Page, New Scientist

Colorado

With the states that are part of the 1922 Colorado River Compact at an impasse over a new plan to manage the water that supports 35 million to 40 million people across seven American states, 30 tribes and two Mexican states, the federal Bureau of Reclamation has released its new management plan for the next decade. It would involve cutting water allotments originally proposed by Arizona, California and Nevada to the tune of 1.5 million acre-feet in 2027 and 2028 and then cuts of three million acre feet thereafter. The 1922 compact assumed 17.5 million acre-feet of water was available; the historical average has been closer to 14.7 million acre-feet, and that number dropped to 11.2 million acre-feet from 2020 to 2024. On the demand side, average use and evaporative loss came in at 13 million acre-feet.

Jake Bolster, Inside Climate News

Le Porge

The village of Le Porge in the south of France is experiencing a secondary negative effect from the wildfires hitting that country when a large cache of 400 heretofore unknown World War II explosives were detonated by the heat. The ammunition depots were buried inside the village by both the French and the Germans and subsequently forgotten about.

Ottilie Mitchell, 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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