Numlock News: February 20, 2026 • Spinosaurus, Kuiper Belt, Figure Skating

Feb 20, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

ROI!!! on Ice

Last night, American Alysa Liu secured a gold medal in figure skating at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, marking it the first medal for Team USA in the women’s event in 24 years. U.S. Figure Skating is the third-largest of the eight Winter Olympic sports governing bodies, with $97.6 million brought in over the past four years — behind only USA Hockey ($205.5 million) and U.S. Ski & Snowboard ($131.2 million). The $1.42 million in grants that USFS received from Team USA amounted to seven percent of the overall Winter Olympics distributions; U.S. Ski & Snowboard, which got $8.8 million, amounted to 44 percent.

Sara Germano, Eben Novy-Williams and Lev Akabas, Sportico

Schism

The Roman Catholic Church is weighing how to handle a potential looming schism, as a breakaway traditionalist group known as the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) has rejected the Vatican’s offer of talks. The group was created in opposition to Vatican II, which modernized the Mass out of Latin and into the vernacular, and SSPX split from Rome in 1988 when its founder consecrated four bishops without papal consent, leading to the excommunication of the archbishop and the four others. Since then, SSPX counts 733 priests, 264 seminarians, 145 religious brothers, 88 oblates and 250 religious sisters. The Society has announced plans to consecrate four new bishops on July 1, as just two remain from the original group, putting the group on a collision course with Rome.

Nicole Winfield, The Associated Press

Cards

Japan is a society that famously favors cash for payments; however, for the first time, the share of cash payments (35.3 percent) fell below the percentage of payments made with credit cards (36.3 percent). Other forms of payment stayed flat. And Japan lags its East Asian peers when it comes to cashless payments market share; in South Korea, 99.1 percent of transactions in 2023 did not involve cash, as did 83.3 percent of transactions in China.

Jo Ishibuchi and Yui Nakamura, Nikkei Asia

Winter

The American West has had a concerningly warm and dry winter, with December coming in as the warmest December in the history of Colorado — 8.9 degrees warmer than the average from 1991 to 2020. Looking at the whole of the Mountain West, the 2025-26 water year is the third-worst ever measured, going back to the time of the Dust Bowl. As it stands, Colorado’s snowpack is at 58 percent of the median. There were only two worse years, and the snowpack measured 40 to 42 percent of average. This is raising early concerns about the Colorado River’s reservoirs. Lake Powell is just 25 percent full, and Lake Mead is just 34 percent full.

Rebecca Boyle, The Atlantic

Roads

A new analysis of the United Kingdom’s landscape found that 71 percent to 74 percent of the U.K.’s roadless areas are smaller than one square kilometer in size, and 60 percent of the roadless patches of the U.K. are smaller than the area that common mammals need to survive. There were 6,138 roadless patches in the U.K. if you count a one-kilometer road effect zone. If you have the road effect zone dialed to 500 meters, there are 29,164 roadless patches, and 93,561 if you consider a road to only affect a 100-meter area. Only 0.002 to 0.014 percent of the roadless areas were greater than 100 square kilometers in size.

Cardiff University

Kuiper Belt

An interesting thing that we found when we started yeeting cameras out past Neptune was all the plantesimals out there shaped like funky peanuts, essentially two rocks glommed together. There are lots and lots of them, which seemed odd given that a two-lobe object lacks the simplicity one would expect of the building blocks of the solar system. A new study sought to simulate the early conditions of the solar system’s formation, and found that in four percent of gravitational collapse simulations, a “contact binary” formed. That is less than the observed prevalence of the Kuiper Belt peanuts but still addresses the elephant in the Belt.

Joseph Howlett, Scientific American

Spinosaurus

“What was Spinosaurus’ deal?” is the question that has consumed paleontology for the past several years. Some argue that the dinosaurs were swimmers that dove into the depths to hunt prey in a semi-aquatic life, while others argue that they were essentially herons from hell, picking off big fish from the shallows. The discovery of a new species dubbed Spinosaurus mirabilis would appear to settle the question. The dino lived 95 million years ago, grew 10 to 14 meters in length, has a 40-centimeter crest on its skull that was probably just for visual displays in addition to its sail. It also — decisively — lived about 1,000 kilometers inland, which would seem to indicate that this was indeed more a heron from hell, who stalked the rivers for prey, as large marine predators never really make it that far upriver.

Michael Le Page, New Scientist

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