Numlock News: February 19, 2026 • Table Tennis, Shark Bites, Project Silica

Feb 19, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Marty

Hot off the attention boost from the success of the Timothée Chalamet movie Marty Supreme, Major League Table Tennis is looking to raise $7.5 million to $10 million for its Series B funding. The first fundraiser for the emerging league amounted to $5.5 million in 2024, drawn from a number of sports business investors. This funding has so far amounted to three seasons of play and the launch of Table Tennis TV (TTTV) (a streaming platform dedicated to the sport) as well as SPINDEX, an official global rating system. The goal is to expand the league to 24 teams over the next 10 years, up from the current 10 teams and 80 players — among them 29 Olympians from 27 different countries. Besides the Josh Safdie movie, eyes are on the 2028 Summer Olympics as the next big inflection point for the sport on the world stage.

Luisa Beltran, Sportico

Sizes

Sizing is erratic and inconsistent across women’s garments. An analysis of the sizing from 15 different brands found no cross-brand consistency and no brand actually aligning with the ASTM standard. When numbered sizing is reduced further down to things like “Medium” or “Large”, things break down further; depending on the brand, “Large” spans waistlines from 29 to 34 inches. The median 15-year-old girl in the United States would be a size 10 according to the ASTM standards, a size 8 at Reformation, and a size 12 at Uniqlo. The median adult woman, a size 18 according to the ASTM, would have as many as 10 different sizes across brands, from a 14 at Reformation to a 2XL at Shein.

Amanda Sakuma with Jan Diehm, The Pudding

Sharks

The number of unprovoked shark bites came in at average levels in 2025, with 65 unprovoked shark bites worldwide. That is a tad below the 10-year average of 72 shark bites. However, fatalities were up, with nine fatal unprovoked shark attacks compared to a 10-year average of six. The United States accounted for 38 percent of the reported incidents worldwide, though perhaps there ought to be an emphasis on reported. The United States saw 25 bites and Australia saw 21 of them. Canada saw its first unprovoked bite since 2021, when a paddleboarder’s equipment was bitten by a white shark. Overall, sharks are in decline, and 30 percent of shark species are endangered.

Jerald Pinson and Gavin Naylor, Florida Museum of Natural History

What Goes Around

A new survey found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the world’s climate is changing as a result of human activity, and another 22 percent say it’s changing even if they won’t attribute it to humans. Either way, lots of people think we’re in for it: 45 percent of respondents said they will see the catastrophic impacts of climate change in their lifetime. Needless to say, those who have a lot more life left tend to feel much more strongly about the matter, and 68 percent of those aged 18 to 29 think that the United States should do more to address climate change. That is well above the 57 percent of U.S. adult citizens overall.

Alexander Rossell Hayes, YouGov

Indonesia

Facebook monetizes content that people post on it in order to keep up the appearance of a vibrant platform full of actual users. In less than a year, the program has grown from 2.7 million users in January 2025 to 12 million participants, and Indonesia is a large constituency of the program. Overall, accounts in Bahasa Indonesia made up about 15 percent of the total monetized accounts as of January, the largest non-English language group. English-language accounts made up eight million accounts in the program, Bahasa Indonesia 1.7 million and then in a distant third, Spanish with 850,000 accounts. For Indonesian content creators, this has made revenue per thousand views competitive with YouTube.

Hazel Gandhi, Rest of World

New York

The Dolan family-owned MSG Sports has approved a plan to spin off the New York Knicks and New York Rangers into separate businesses. Among a certain class of New York sports fans, this decision provoked the kind of response that usually requires blowing up a Death Star to achieve. There are no timelines, no guarantees and no approvals yet from the leagues to which the teams belong. However, the market was delighted by the news, sending the stock up 13 percent. The financial reasoning is that the market cap of MSG Sports is about $8 billion, but the private market valuation of the Knicks ($9.85 billion) and Rangers ($3.65 billion) ought to put the value closer to $13.5 billion. By spinning off the teams and perhaps finding a private owner or minority stake sale, the teams could realize a valuation closer to the theoretical. Perhaps they might even win!

Justin Birnbaum, Sportico

Borosilicate

A team at Microsoft called Project Silica stored nearly two terabytes of data on a two-millimeter-thick piece of borosilicate glass, sized 12 centimeters by 12 centimeters, encoded with short laser pulses. It’s an appealing achievement because glass is physically and chemically stable, not to mention capable of lasting for much, much longer than existing forms of digital media storage. Writing, which is accomplished with a femtosecond laser, was achieved at 66 megabits per second. With a slab of glass potentially able to store 4.84 terabytes of data, along with the possibility of a dozen lasers working simultaneously, it will take 150 hours to completely write a slab that will be stable for 10,000 years at room temperature.

John Timmer, Ars Technica and Robert F. Service, Science

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