Numlock News: July 1, 2026 • Shetland, Supersonic, Caviar

Jul 01, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Durian

A bumper crop of durian during the same year that many plantations have mature trees of a promising new variety has sent the Malaysian market roiling, prompting some vendors to just give the fruit away. Malaysia ordinarily produces about 550,000 tonnes of durian per year, but 2026 has been abundant, and it crashed the price of the beloved fruit across Asia. One factor fueling the issue is the Musang King, a particularly prized variety in China known there as the “Hermès of durians.” The issue is, once it started getting popular, a bunch of farms switched over to it and all those farms’ orchards reached maturity at around the same time. Some sellers are dropping the price by a third to 50 ringgit per kilogram.

Koh Ewe and Kelly Ng, BBC News

Chosen

The company behind a money-printing spin on an iconic franchise based on the hottest I.P. ever told has been dragged into court amid allegations of screwing over early investors. The Chosen, a high-budget television show that adapts the timeless story of a carpenter from the Levant who makes good, made its $11 million budget for the first season thanks to crowdfunding that meant that 16,000 Series B stockholders had skin in the game on the Lamb of God. The franchise has gone on to be a massive hit, bringing in tens of millions at the box office, ahead of what (and I’m just intuiting based on the source material) is poised to be a shocking final season. In March, 5&2 Studios cashed out those Series B stockholders at $3.75 a share, which many investors viewed as their version of 30 pieces of silver. The plaintiffs allege that the original math from 5&2 was that The Chosen and its follow-up movies and television shows could generate $1.4 billion from 2026 to 2029, implying a $150 million enterprise value. Instead, they claim, insiders cooked the numbers, dropping the revenue projection to $722 million, which dropped the valuation to $52.9 million and prompted the $3.75-a-share kiss on the other cheek goodbye. Behold, The Day of Judgement is nigh, not on the plain of Armageddon, but in Wilmington, at the Delaware Court of Chancery.

Eriq Gardner, Puck

Supersonic

A new Federal Aviation Administration proposal would repeal a policy dating to 1973 that banned non-military aircraft from traveling faster than the speed of sound while over U.S. soil. The ban originally came because the shock waves stemming from supersonic jets’ sonic booms can cause property damage, and were also considered to be incredibly irritating: In the 1960s, the FAA and U.S. Air Force conducted sonic boom testing over Oklahoma City over a six-month period in order to gauge what inhabitants felt, and there were thousands of complaints and damage claims. What’s changed in the interim? Well, on one hand, the regulator proposed a limit on sonic boom overpressure to not exceed 0.11 pounds per square foot at the surface, but more importantly, rich people want to do this so the government doesn’t actually care all that much about what you think anymore.

Allyson Versprille, Bloomberg

Brick

The next trendy device is one specifically designed to disable the rest of your trendy devices. The Brick is one of many phone-locking gadgets to emerge in response to people getting concerned about their screen time; it locks off parts of a phone’s operating system and apps once the phone taps a small plastic brick. According to SimilarWeb data, downloads of the Brick app rose from 14,000 last October to 33,710 in November, then 103,632 in January, and there were 59,729 downloads in May alone.

Ashley Wong, The Wall Street Journal

Keeping Up With The Faroes

The local government has approved a plan that would link up Shetland’s mainland to neighboring islands in the Scottish archipelago by tunnel, a project that would replace an ailing ferry system. A feasibility study first proposed adding two tunnels — one connecting Shetland to Yell and then another tunnel from Yell to Unst, with two possible further tunnels to Whalsay and Bressay to come. Currently the council operates a ferry system connecting nine islands. Unst is the most northerly island in the United Kingdom, and is the site of the U.K.’s only spaceport. The tunnel investment paid off big for the Faroe Islands, 200 miles to the West, which counts over 20 tunnels of which four run under the sea within the self-governing nation in the Kingdom of Denmark.

James Cook and John Johnson, BBC News

Caviar

The company that sells Kaluga Queen brand caviar went public on Tuesday in a Hong Kong IPO, a big move for the company that has a 36.1 percent market share for sturgeon roe. China was responsible for 54 percent of global caviar production in 2025 thanks largely to Kaluga Queen, which exports about 80 percent of its roe, particularly to Germany, France, the U.S., Japan and Singapore, with domestic sales accounting for just 16.2 percent of revenue. China is projected to account for about two-thirds of caviar production by 2030.

Lorretta Chen, Nikkei Asia

Bugs

Over the past three centuries, scientists have described about one million species of insects. The field of entomology understands that it’s a long way off from describing all of the insects on Earth, though, and the consensus was that in total, given what we know about the distribution and diversity of insects, there are probably something like six million species. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences increases that number considerably by pulling from a statistical technique developed by epidemiologists, suggesting that there may be as many as 20 million insect species on the planet.

Annie Roth, Science

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; flag corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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