Numlock News: February 4, 2026 • Geodynamo, Tornado, Bass Fishing

Feb 04, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Bass

A deeply enviable position to be in is being the guy who invents the Super Bowl of the sport you like: uniting multiple disparate leagues, often with a lot of money, to form one big combined championship. The most well-known example is the NFL and AFL squaring off in the Super Bowl, but for more contemporary examples, think what LIV tried to do in golf, or what the UEFA Champions League did for European soccer. Well, a guy is trying to do that for professional bass fishing, which has undergone a fragmentation at the highest echelons of the sport, with the Bassmaster Elite Series and Major League Fishing’s Bass Pro Tour splitting the honors of the anglers. With about $12 million in investment, World Bass Enterprises is endeavoring to launch The Champions, a tournament that will invite the 25 top anglers from each of the circuits with an overall purse of $3 million. That amount will doubtless be enough to lure (I regret nothing) contenders in, given the “mere” six-figure prizes of the current top bass tournaments.

Eben Novy-Williams, Sportico

Russia

The latest date from Russia's Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank of Russia points to serious economic issues related to the continued war in Ukraine, indicating that the government will have serious challenges ramping up spending. Federal government spending in the 12 months ending November 2025 was 5.3 trillion rubles, 15.3 percent higher than in the 12 months ending November 2024. Even with tax increases, over 80 percent of the increase in Russian federal spending was financed by an increase in deficit. Furthermore, evidence that the Russian banking system has been pushed into the war effort by surging loans to companies in war-related industries is mounting. In fact, Russian nonfinancial businesses have issued 29 trillion rubles more in liabilities than they have accumulated in financial assets. Either way, the evidence is that Russia’s war economy can’t keep this up indefinitely. Even if it can, the kind of financial surge needed to meaningfully take more of Ukraine’s territory seems out of the question.

Matthew C. Klein, The Overshoot

Gas

Many hospital systems are phasing out the use of desflurane, an anesthetic, except in cases of medical necessity. Several anesthetics are massive pollutants, and in many cases, other medications are equally effective and often cheaper. About 600 out of 1,000 surveyed hospitals in the U.S. and Canada have dropped the routine use of desflurane, a move that contributed to a 30 percent decrease in anesthetic greenhouse gas emissions over the course of a decade. Desflurane has 2,530 times the global warming effects of carbon dioxide and is 50 times as bad as comparable anesthetics. And there are indeed comparable anesthetics: sevoflurane and isoflurane are anywhere from a third to 85 percent cheaper, anyway.

Emma Court, Bloomberg

Lyme

A new study out of The Ohio State University found that the prevalence of ticks in the state is making it as risky for Lyme as Connecticut is, where the disease was first spotted. A study of ticks collected in 2010 found that Lyme was found in 2.4 percent of blacklegged ticks collected in Coshocton County, a figure that (as of this new study) is up to 47.6 percent. Ohio, once relatively safe, is now just as rough as the East Coast.

Emily Caldwell, The Ohio State University

Blobs

A new study published in Nature Geoscience attributes the shape of Earth’s magnetic field to two enormous blobs of superheated material surrounded by a ring of cooler rock at the base of Earth’s mantle — 2,900 kilometers under Africa and under the Pacific. The study combined paleomagnetic observations and simulations of the flow of liquid iron in the outer core, called the geodynamo, and allowed researchers to reconstruct observations of Earth’s magnetic field.

University of Liverpool

Correction: We have removed a section of today’s newsletter pertaining to a 2026 tornado forecast after an examination of the covered forecasting group raised questions about the veracity of the claim. The cited story may be found at Carrier Management.

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