Numlock News: February 27, 2026 • Observatory, Bubbles, Retirement

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

A Champ Stamp

Major League Soccer has announced that it is allowing a fourth location on MLS jerseys that can be sold to sponsors, allowing teams to sell the real estate below a player’s number. The location is about 80 percent of the size of the front-of-jersey sponsorship — a maximum width of 9 inches and maximum height of 4 inches — and the new space is expected to sell for around $1 million annually for clubs.

Eben Novy-Williams, Sportico

Endurance

The McMurdo Docking Pier has arrived in Antarctica after a 9,159 nautical mile journey that took it from Gunderson Marine & Iron in Portland, Oregon, to McMurdo Station, Antarctica by way of New Zealand. The pier was towed over the course of 69 days averaing 5.5 knots, and replaced a seasonal ice pier that historically served the outpost. The old pier was deemed unusable in 2025 after sustaining serious damage. On the final tow over the perilous Southern Ocean from New Zealand to Antarctica, the tow hit 30-foot seas.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Rubin

February 24 was the long-awaited first night of public access to the reams of data coming out of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which began operations last year. A long-awaited function of the observatory, which is consistently monitoring the night sky, is the automatic alert it sends to astronomers around the world with potentially promising activity. The observatory flags unexpected movements, changes and observations that hadn’t been there on previous nights. On the first night of public access, that led to 800,000 automatically-generated alerts, which is expected to grow to millions every night.

Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

Organ Donation

New technology and medical procedures have made it possible for previously-unviable organs to be donated to another person. As recently as 2000, only two percent of donated organs came from people who had undergone circulatory death. Most donated organs came from people who had been declared brain dead, but whose hearts continued operating. For patients who underwent circulatory death, their families chose to stop life support, and those organs were considered no good as they went without oxygen and nutrients. However, new tools such as normothermic regional perfusion (which temporarily restores blood flow) and machine perfusion devices (which pump oxygen-rich blood into organs after removal) have made it possible to bring that two percent up to 49 percent of donors as of 2025.

Shira Polan, NYU Langone Health

Retirement

A new survey from the Pew Research Center found that 93 percent of U.S. adults aged 65 and older currently live in their own home or apartment, and nine percent say someone provides care for them in the home. When that group of adults who lived alone without a caregiver were asked what they would prefer to do if there came a time when they could not care for themselves, 60 percent said they’d want to live in their own home with a caregiver, 18 percent wanted to move to an assisted living facility, 11 percent would prefer a family member’s home, one percent a nursing home, and eight percent said they had some other arrangement.

Kim Parker and Luona Lin, Pew Research Center

Natural Hydrogen

Hydrogen is being considered for widespread use as a fuel source, and the manner in which the hydrogen is obtained has led to a legion of color-coded shorthands. There’s green hydrogen (made from electrolysis from green energy), purple hydrogen (hydrolysis from nuclear), blue hydrogen (pulled out of natural gas), black hydrogen (from coal) and orange hydrogen (from subsurface rocks). The universe is just lousy with hydrogen, and so is Earth, for that matter. White hydrogen, or gold hydrogen, is just pulled out of the ground from subsurface accumulations. There’s lots of it: the U.S. Geological Survey estimates there could be five trillion metric tons of geological hydrogen, though only a small fraction would be recoverable. Still, two percent of that is still more than all proven natural gas reserves on the planet and would meet demand for 200 years. The Earth naturally produces 15 million to 31 million metric tons of hydrogen every year.

Promise Longe, The Conversation

Bubble

Popping bubbles is a major concern and expense for the industry. Whether you're manufacturing pharmaceuticals in bioreactors, making foods and beverages or producing chemicals, bubbles can cause serious problems. Production lines often have vast arrays of advanced technology deployed to keep bubbles out of where they shouldn’t be. Companies use foam breakers to tear bubbles apart, they dump in antifoaming agents, they blast liquids with ultrasound. In fact, a new study out of MIT created tiny porous silicon membranes ranging from 10 microns to 200 microns, and found that they were capable of bursting the bubbles at 1,000 times the rate.

Zach Winn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Amanda Sakuma who wrote Fit 4 a Teen for The Pudding, which is about “the inter-generational struggle to find clothes that fit more than a tiny portion of women.” As is always the case with stories from The Pudding, the interactive charts in this thing are just superb and eye-opening. We spoke about the data collection that went into this project, what you can learn from making your own garments. If you love this project as much as I do, Amanda is launching her DIY Wardrobe project on Instagram and YouTube.

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