Numlock News: February 13, 2026 • Yangtze, Warner Bros., Medals
By Walt Hickey
Numlock is off Monday in observation of Presidents’ Day. Have a great weekend!
One Battle
Warner Bros. produced the two films currently seen as leaders in the Oscar race, the hit vampire movie Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler, and the Paul Thomas Anderson epic One Battle After Another. The studio is reportedly being very assiduous about its resource allocation for each Oscar campaign so as not to reveal a favorite or put its thumb on the scale. Each awards campaign budget comes in at nearly an equal dollar amount, reported to be between $14 million and $16 million. It’s far from unheard of for a studio to have two contenders for Best Picture, but it does get dicey when one has two leading contenders. In 2017, Fox Searchlight was in a similar position when it released both Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri as well as The Shape of Water, not to mention the 1974 race between Paramount’s The Godfather Part II and Chinatown or the 1961 race when United Artists had both West Side Story and Judgement at Nuremberg.
Luminous
A star that had been observed for decades in the Andromeda Galaxy, named M31-2014-DS1, brightened in 2015 only to swiftly disappear from view. Astronomers contend it is consistent with transformation into a black hole. The star, which is — sorry, was — 2.5 million light-years from Earth, initially had a mass of around 13 times as massive as the sun prior to its collapse. It lived for 15 million years, over which it expelled about 60 percent of its mass through solar winds.
Medals
Italy, which is hosting the Olympics, is having a great games. The country seems to be outperforming its historical average considerably. With six golds, two silvers and seven bronze medals, Italy is pulling in 8.5 more medals than we’d expect based on its historical average — a solid sign of home-slope advantage.
Dogs
There are about 40,000 service dogs worldwide, trained and bred by about 200 organizations at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars per animal — a number that doesn’t even include police or military dogs. Only about half of the dogs bred for the work actually graduate and become service animals, meaning that considerable expense goes to training dogs that fail out. As a result, any edge that can be gained ahead of time in breeding the animals for success is a welcome one. That is one reason why the International Working Dog Registry has a massive repository of health, behavior and genealogy information from over 100,000 working dogs from 23 countries. When linked to a liquid nitrogen-cooled repository of doggy reproductive matter, it can supplement breeding stock around the world with desirable, tried-and-true traits.
Loans
New data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York indicated that about one million borrowers defaulted on their federal student loans last year, with 9.6 percent of balances at least 90 days past due. As of September, 3.3 million borrowers were between 31 and 270 days late on payment and 3.6 million were technically in default (more than 270 days late on their payments). Another 5.2 million were actually in default as of September 30, though most had defaulted prior to the pandemic. In addition, 9.8 million borrowers are in forbearance, pausing their payments while the loans accumulate interest.
Yangtze
The Chinese government issued a 10-year fishing ban on the Yangtze River in 2021 after 70 years of declines in aquatic biodiversity, and the initial data show that the decision is a smashing success. According to a new study published in Science that looked at fish communities in the river from 2018 to 2023, fish biomass more than doubled after the intervention. Species richness is also increasing, albeit modestly, snapping the seven-decade trend. Look no further than the only living freshwater mammal in the river, the Yangtze finless porpoise, which saw its population rise by a third, from 445 porpoises in 2017 to 595 in 2022.
Don’t Take That Tone
A survey of Americans in relationships asks which topics were the most likely to be the subject of arguments. The key conclusion is that it’s mainly about how we’re talking to each other. All told, 36 percent said that they at least “sometimes” argue about tone of voice or attitude, while another 29 percent argue about communication styles — the two top sources of relationship friction. Of the meaty stuff, 26 percent argue about money, 23 percent emotional needs, 21 percent life decisions and 21 percent household chores.
This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to the writer an artist behind one of my favorite books of last year, Keezy Young, the author of the 2025 graphic novel Hello, Sunshine and the new comic It’s Bitter, Baby, and it’s Very Sweet. Young’s got a phenomenal artistic style and the graphic novel was a clever and immersive mystery that I’ve still been thinking about months later. With the release of their horror one-shot It’s Bitter, Baby, and it’s Very Sweet, I wanted to have Keezy on to talk about the books. Hello, Sunshine can be found wherever books are sold, It’s Bitter, Baby, and it’s Very Sweet is available for purchase and download at Itch.io, and Keezy Young can be found on BlueSky. Check it out.
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The story about biodiversity on the Yangtze River is a rare "good news" environmental story, though it's still appalling what humanity has done to that river.