Numlock News: February 26, 2026 • Bees, Noses, Gyms

Feb 26, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Color

The market for inorganic pigments — the kind of chemicals that you can splash on a car and expect to last indefinitely as a stable paint — is worth about $28 billion a year. Organic pigments have their uses and are versatile. They can be blended into all kinds of shades, but they are often chemically fragile or too short-lived, requiring coatings in order to prevent degradation. The big gap in the safe, inorganic pigment color wheel is a red that can retain brightness and permanence; that red Ferrari coat comes from organic pigments and only persists thanks to a UV-protective coating. The person or company that finds a safe, inorganic red will get very, very rich.

Hayley Bennett, New Scientist

Planet Fitness

Gym juggernaut Planet Fitness is the largest gym company in America, now reporting 20.8 million members. Since 2011, membership has increased by 617 percent, but the actual location count is only up by a merely breathtaking 493 percent. As it stands, your average Planet Fitness location claims enough members to fill a modestly-sized arena, averaging 7,182 members per storefront. That is actually down from a high of 7,262 members per location as of 2023. Anyway, there’s a whole group chat, and the news is they’ve all gotten together and decided to start working out exactly fifteen minutes before you get to the gym.

David Crowther and Claire Yubin Oh, Sherwood News

Rhinoplasty

In 2024, members of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons performed 48,423 rhinoplasties — up from 32,484 procedures as recently as 2019. That surge in nose jobs is thanks in part to a rise in subtle procedures, often composed of fillers to tweak the nose or more precise vibrating instruments to facilitate the bone-cutting. While the average price of a traditional rhinoplasty is $7,637, less invasive procedures that rely on fillers can come in south of $2,000.

Alina Dizik, Bloomberg

Comments

A new analysis of comments made under articles of The Guardian newspaper found that the cruelest ones were often made very, very quickly. The analysis looked at the one million comments (out of 38 million) that were eventually deleted and removed for breaking the community guidelines from 2006 to 2024. Disproportionately, hateful comments tended to stream in fast and then peter out, as cooler heads eventually made their way to the comment section.

University of Gothenburg

Manga

While sales in the United States have surged, Japan’s domestic market remains by far the most important and consequential market for manga. Bad news, since the latest data out of Japan shows the publishing industry taking a step backward for the first time in years. The domestic market for manga shrank by 1.7 percent last year, coming in at 693 billion yen (US$4.45 billion). Print manga sales dropped 14.4 percent, and the dominant digital manga’s 2.9 percent growth was not enough to make back the difference. Print and digital manga accounted for fully 44.8 percent of total book publishing sales in Japan.

Richardson Handjaja, Animenomics

Solar

The Energy Information Administration released the full-year data from the country’s electrical generation in 2025, with solar energy continuing its massive string of growth. Solar energy accounted for seven percent of U.S. electricity generation, surpassing hydroelectric’s six percent share. Overall, solar generation was up 34.5 percent year over year in terms of power generation.

John Timmer, Ars Technica

Bees

A new paper published in Nature Communications raises the global estimate of bee species, arguing that the true number of bee species on Earth is between 24,705 and 26,164. It’s a complex apian ecosystem that means there are still 3,700 to 5,200 more species out there that are currently unknown. The study drew from existing data on known species of bees found in 186 countries, concluding that scientists have discovered an average of 117 new bee species each year since 1960. The study also argues that the rate of discovery is limited not by the number of unique bee species, but rather by the number of scientists studying bees. Estimates say it could take a minimum of 30 to 45 years before the knowledge gap might be closed.

India Glyde, University of Wollongong

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