Numlock News: February 10, 2026 • Isbjørne, Ships, Snails

Feb 10, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Hershey’s

Confectioner Hershey’s has been quietly building up a portfolio of salty snacks that have come to generate 10 percent of its $11 billion in annual revenue. The revenue has been fueled by the acquisition of four salty brands since 2017: SkinnyPop popcorn, Pirate’s Booty cheese puffs, Dot’s Homestyle pretzels and LesserEvil, which makes organic snacks. In just Q4, the brands combined for $357 million in sales, up 28 percent year over year. Dot’s has doubled its market share in the pretzel business to 22 percent since being acquired four years ago, and SkinnyPop is now up to 26 percent of the ready-to-eat popcorn business.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Bad Bunny

Viewership for Bad Bunny’s halftime show at Super Bowl LX came in at 135 million, according to initial reports from Apple yet to be confirmed by Nielsen. Were those figures to pan out, this puts Bad Bunny narrowly ahead of the viewership of the Kendrick Lamar halftime show in 2025 (which had 133.4 million tune-ins) to be the most-watched halftime show ever.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Abandon Ship

In 2016, there were 20 ships abandoned around the world, according to the International Transport Workers’ Federation. It is a situation that leaves the crew geopolitically adrift, since the crews themselves are also abandoned by ownership along with the vessels in strange ports with no way to get home. The rise of off-the-books fleets and the abuse of flags of convenience has only made the problem worse. Last year, there were 410 abandoned vessels, which affected 6,223 merchant seamen — each figure up by about a third over 2024. Ships flying under a flag of convenience — registered in a country with little oversight like Panama, Liberia and the Marshall Islands — accounted for 82 percent of abandoned ships, despite only accounting for 46.5 percent of merchant ships by weight.

David Waddell, BBC News

Asphalt

A new study looked at the real-world performance of new road-making technology that blends recycled plastic into asphalt to make roads. The study found that replacing eight to 10 percent of the petroleum-based binder bitumen with melted plastic (from the likes of single-use bags and plastic bottles) resulted in a number of structural and environmental benefits. All told, they sequestered about 4.5 tons of plastic waste in every mile of a one-lane road in a project near Dallas. Structurally, adding in the plastic waste was similar to the effect rebar has on concrete, with the roads more resilient to extreme temperatures and high traffic. A 2024 study found that the release of microplastics from such recycled plastic-asphalt was a thousand times less than the release of rubber particles from worn tires.

Md S Hossain, The Conversation

EV

China’s electric vehicle business is increasingly looking international in pursuit of growth, in no small part because the domestic industry has been flooded with aspiring automakers and the business is so cutthroat that it’s hard to squeak out profits within China. Altogether, EV exports from China increased 70 percent year over year to 3.43 million vehicles last year, with the United Arab Emirates (192,000 Chinese vehicles sold last year) and Mexico (221,000) as the fastest-growing markets. Only 15 of the China’s129 electric vehicle brands are expected to be profitable in 2030, and 400 EV brands have collapsed since 2018.

Kinling Lo, Rest of World

Crawfish

In Louisiana, rice and crawfish are often grown together in the same flooded fields. However, a pair of invasive species is threatening both of those harvests, as apple snails have been thriving in the crawfish ecosystems and tiny insects called delphacids have been wreaking havoc on rice crops. Apple snails can survive in all kinds of weather, lay thousands of eggs every month and can be the size of a baseball when fully grown. Pesticides are not an option, as the chemicals that can kill snails will also hurt crustaceans. Additionally, since people tend to eat rice and crawfish (rather than them ending up in animal feed), the chemicals available to be used are pretty limited anyway. The delphacids are a particularly tricky problem; when Texas was hit with a surge of the tiny bugs last year, yields dropped 50 percent in the second rice crop of the year.

Melina Walling and Joshua A. Bickel, The Associated Press

Island Life

Researchers have found evidence that humans visited the Kitsissut Islands northwest of Greenland between 3,938 and 4,400 years ago — a trek that would have required them to cross a minimum of 52.7 kilometers of open water, a remarkable sea voyage in the Arctic. The researchers found five sites with a total of 297 archaeological features on the three islands of Isbjørne, Mellem and Nordvest. The only comparable Arctic crossing is the 82-kilometer Bering Strait. What’s fascinating is that the region of water these researchers looked into — the Pikialasorsuaq polynya — only formed about 4,500 years ago, before which it was under lots and lots of ice. This would indicate that humans visited somewhat shortly after the emergence of the islands.

Michael Marshall, New Scientist

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