Numlock News: August 6, 2026 • Frida Kahlo, Witch Hat Atelier, Pringles

Aug 06, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Anime

Twin Engine is an anime production company responsible for hits such as Witch Hat Atelier and Vinland Saga, and this week, it announced a joint venture with a titan of the industry, Bandai, the toy company that owns licenses for Mobile Suit Gundam, One Piece and Dragon Ball. The four-billion-yen (US$25.35 million) joint venture is a possible sign of a shift in the strategy within Japan’s sprawling entertainment business. While it is globally popular, the industry still sees some of the largest and most successful companies struggle financially. The longstanding process of producing anime, the production committee system, has been rife with production problems and often results in the animation studios hired on contract losing out on profits. This format linking Bandai and Twin Engine as partners up front would seem to level that playing field.

Francesco Cacciatore, Polygon

Puma

The presence of fierce carnivorous cats in an area made the adjacent roads significantly safer for drivers, a new study of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington found. When pumas were present in an area, deer were more active during the day than at night, and were 15 percent less likely to be in areas with lots of roads, instead opting for remote areas. As a result of those behavioral changes, there was a 67 percent reduction in the likelihood of a deer-vehicle collision, and a 76 percent decline in the expected number of collisions between vehicles and deer over five years. For me, a longstanding advocate of Vision Zero in my community, the conclusion is obvious: It’s well past time we released dozens if not hundreds of cougars into Manhattan.

Julia Grimmett, Cell Press

Phone Home

A nationwide field experiment across 80,000 K-12 school principals in the United States involved those administrators getting an email from a fictitious two-parent household with both a mother and a father interested in enrolling a child, with each email listing both parents, each with a phone number, asking for a call. The emails randomly varied the names and the wording, and the study found that when neither parent appeared more available than the other, mothers were 1.4 times more likely than fathers to get the first phone call, and of principals who called someone back, 60 percent contacted the mother first. Even when the fathers were presented as having significantly more availability to talk, many principals still called mom first.

Laura K. Gee, Kristy Buzzard and Olga Stoddard, The Conversation

Moonshot

Scientists are confirming that a rogue SpaceX rocket has indeed crashed into the moon as was previously forecasted. Despite the efforts of many, it appears nobody actually managed to directly observe the collision, which involved a four-ton Falcon rocket upper stage slamming into Earth’s satellite at 8,700 kilometers per hour. While we missed the moment of impact, the evidence of a collision is clear: the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope observed a stream of sodium and lithium stretching several kilometers into space for five to ten minutes after the projected impact.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

Pringles

Pringles are assembled from a potato dough that is fried on a production line, and thanks to a new implementation of the long-touted “digital twin” production technology. Kellanova is approaching a perfectly consistent chip product. Three factories in Poland, Belgium and Tennessee produce 705 million pounds of Pringles per year. The digital twin tech, operational on one line in Poland, has delivered a 10 percent improvement in Pringles quality, a 13 percent reduction in waste and a 40 percent return on the upfront investment.

Isabelle Bousquette, The Wall Street Journal

Generally

Last month, Chinese leader Xi Jinping promoted two officers to full general, an ordinarily routine procedure that, thanks to purges in the People’s Liberation Army, has increased the number of full generals serving on active duty in theater commander leader grades by 50 percent. Yes, out of 27 such leadership posts, 21 of them have no confirmed occupant, and just six full generals are on active duty in those posts, the rest held by lieutenant generals in an acting capacity. This follows a three-year purge, the deepest in the military since the Cultural Revolution.

Christopher Nye, Nikkei Asia

Kahlo

The Gelman Collection is a trove of artworks consisting of 10 Frida Kahlo oil paintings and over 100 other works from other Mexican artists, a collection which came into the possession of prominent Mexican businessman Marcelo Zambrano in 2023. For the first time in decades, the works were exhibited in Mexico, but financial engineering on the part of Zambrano — who pledged the art as collateral for a loan from Santander, Spain’s largest bank — risks Mexico losing control of some of its most significant artistic and cultural heritage. Santander will manage the 161 works, calling it the Gelman Santander collection, and they will be shipped to Spain, where they will remain through at least 2030. Needless to say, it’s caused a major controversy in Mexico: Kahlo produced only about 150 paintings in her life, and as of 2025, less than 50 are on display in Mexico, with only eight in public museums. The Gelman collection generated $400,000 to $1 million in annual revenue from 2012 to 2022; Zambrano purchased the collection with a loan from Sotheby’s, a loan which was later replaced with the Santander loan.

Andrea Navarro and David Alire Garcia, Bloomberg

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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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