Numlock News: January 20, 2026 • Pleistocene, Heated Rivalry, Moneywall

Jan 20, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Return of the King

Avatar: Fire and Ash retained its spot at the top of the box office with another $17.8 million over the four-day weekend, good for $1.31 billion globally. That said, it appears that momentum is running out for Fire and Ash faster than the previous two films in the franchise, which made $2.9 billion and $2.3 billion. The film 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple made just $15 million over the four-day weekend, coming in shy of estimates. One of the larger releases of the weekend was a three-day re-release of The Lord of the Rings, with Fellowship of the Ring earning $3.85 million on Friday, The Two Towers making $2.6 million on Saturday and The Return of the King making $2.5 million on Sunday.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Heated Rivalry

Heated Rivalry has become one of the buzziest shows on television, but the gay hockey drama is also making waves in the book world as the novel upon which it is based has shot up the charts and become an overnight bestseller. Unit sales of Heated Rivalry increased over 1,000 percent in the weeks between the show’s debut and the week ending January 10. The trade paperback of Heated Rivalry sold 23,000 copies in the week ending on the 10th, coming in at No. 7 on the weekly BookScan list. For perspective, in the entirety of 2025, the trade paperback sold just shy of 42,000 copies. The second season of the show is believed to be based on the book The Long Game, which picks up where Heated Rivalry left off; that book (which had sold 2,495 copies as of November 29) has now seen sales reach 30,567 unit sales release-to-date as of January 10.

Sam Spratford, Publishers Weekly

Moneywall

The Kansas City Royals announced a change is projected to be worth an additional 1.5 wins next season: the club is moving the outfield walls in left and right field and lowering the fence by 18 inches in most places. The Royals are specifically altering the layout of the field to favor their offense at home. Kauffman Stadium is unfriendly to hitters, and the dimensions of the outfield have turned homeruns into caught balls. In the past, the Royals have attempted to build the team to suit the unique home field, signing contact hitters and favoring speed for the second-largest outfield in the sport. With the change, the small-market Royals no longer need to have such rigid personnel targets.

Eben Novy-Williams, Club Sportico

Edge

A new study sought to find out how much advantage a little bit of cheating could give a player during a chess match. It concluded that just a few moves made with the consultation of a 3190 Elo Chess solver would drastically shift the odds in a cheater’s favor. Across 100,000 simulated matches, a player’s advantage could be boosted to 66 percent chance of winning if the player used a computer on just one move in a game, and increased to 84 percent on average if the player got advice on three turns. Timing was consequential as well; one single intervention 30 moves into a game could increase one’s chances by 15 percentage points, while five cheats deployed randomly only saw a 7.5 percentage point improvement.

Chris Stokel-Walker, New Scientist

British

New data moves back the return of humans to the British Isles following the retreat of the ice sheet by 500 years. The new date suggests that the return happened about 15,200 years ago, which also was a time of a significant increase in summer temperatures in southern Britain. Previous research had put the earliest appearance of humans back in Britain at 14,700 years ago, but that was always a peculiar time because it coincided with a cold period during which it would not have been advantageous to leave the continent for a frozen island to the north. One other factor is that reindeer and horses have been consistently detected in southern Britain as of around 15,500 years ago, meaning that the food did return before the hunters did, which would make sense.

Adrian Palmer, The Conversation

Baseodiscus the Eldest

There are about 1,300 species of ribbon worms, most of whom lead an unremarkable life in seafloors or rocky shorelines. One sample specimen, a Baseodiscus, was caught from the wild sometime between 1996 and 1998 and then kept in a tank at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The tank eventually made its way to William & Mary, and the worm — since called Baseodiscus the Eldest — has been pulled out and shown to invertebrate zoology classes since. That said, nobody actually knew how old the worm was, so after looking into it a new paper estimated that B is at minimum 27 years old, which is not only a new record for ribbon worms (previous record: 3) but also means it is indeed older than one of the authors of the paper.

Marina Wang, Scientific American

Pronghorn

Pronghorn are some of the fastest land animals on Earth, and their speed and adaptability are key reasons for their survived while other fauna of the Ice Age died out. The earliest ancestors of the pronghorn appeared in the Miocene 20 million years ago, but the modern pronghorn evolved during the ice ages that began 2.58 million years ago. When those abruptly ended in North American 11,700 years ago, the pronghorn survived; remains of pronghorn that are 17,000 to 20,000 years old are indistinguishable from modern pronghorn. They’re an exception to the rule. There were dozens of large mammals in Pleistocene North America, and only 26 species are still alive today. At least 59 species from that number have gone extinct, with one estimate placing it at 72 percent of large mammal species disappearing, mostly in an incredibly brief period from 13,800 to 11,400 years ago. Why some animals survive mass extinctions and others don’t is not a merely theoretical question anymore, so figuring out whether it’s the pronghorn’s diet or their lifespan or their mass that differentiated them from their fossilized peers is a fascinating area of study these days.

Emilene Ostlind, High Country News

If you subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! It’s fun, and supporters keep this thing ad-free. This is the best way to support a thing you like to read:

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Tough Cookie · Bigfoot · How To Read This Chart · Uncharted Territory · Fantasy High · Ghost Hunting · Theodora & Justinian · Across the Movie Aisle · Radioactive Shrimp ·

Numlock News

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?