Numlock News: July 15, 2026 • Emmy, Sprinkler, Action

Jul 15, 2026

By Walt Hickey

The Action Is The Juice

A New York man has been charged with receiving 27,000 payments worth $1.3 million from 107 different class action lawsuit settlements paid out between 2022 and 2025. The man admitted to using fake names attached to some 480 bank accounts across eight different financial institutions to make claims in hundreds of class action suits, including settlements worth $27,060 from Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep, $43,000 across 437 claims from Vimeo, $761 from Porsche and even $1,718 from EpiPen. The man resorted to the scheme — which led to criminal charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering — after losing his job and some crypto losses.

Andrew G. Simpson, Insurance Journal

Birds

A new study has determined that birds probably actually do enjoy flying, with the researchers inviting 17 galas at Vogelpark Avifauna to take part in flight demonstrations, and then subsequently observed the birds, tested their levels of optimism and then collected droppings to determine levels of a breakdown product of corticosterone, a stress hormone. The study, published in the journal Behavior, found that flying likely leads to positive emotions in the cockatoos and, as long thought, slipping the surly bonds of Earth and taking to the skies is indeed probably extremely rad even for the creatures for which it is utterly routine.

Niels Kerstes, Phys.org

Tanker

Ukraine claimed strikes on an additional 11 Russian-linked vessels in the Sea of Azov, the waterway East of Russian-occupied Crimea. Over the course of the nine-day campaign, Ukraine has damaged 116 ships in a sustained effort to choke off Russian resupply lines and cut off its capacity to ship oil. This most recent set of strikes hit five tankers, five cargo ships and one tugboat. The goal is to wage economic warfare on Russia and undermine its ability to finance the war with exports. As of Monday, Reuters reported that commercial vessels have been unable to enter or leave the Sea of Azov through the Kerch Strait or Azov-Don shipping channel.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Surely You’re Soaking, Mr. Feynman

A new experiment appears to have finally put to rest one of the more famous propositions of physics, the Feynman sprinkler problem. The problem is simple in its presentation: We know that a rotating sprinkler submerged underwater would spin away from the direction that water is being ejected, but what about a sprinkler that sucked water into its arms rather than sprayed out? First proposed in 1883 by Ernst Mach, the problem was spread by famous physicist Richard Feynman; an NYU team has cracked it and published the paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The answer, per the experiment, was that it moves in the opposite direction as the spraying sprinkler but at about one-fortieth of the speed.

Kenneth Chang, The New York Times

Emmy

The Emmy award for Main Title Theme is embroiled in controversy this year with the nomination of The Beast in Me, which landed composer Sean Callery a nomination. The source of the controversy? One of the most common trends of television these days: Is the theme song too short? Per the Emmy rules, main title theme music must be at least 15 seconds in length, and a main title theme must appear in 50 percent or more of eligible episodes. The controversy here is that eagle-eared viewers claim The Beast in Me never actually runs for 15 seconds: running 11 seconds in episode one, 8 seconds in episode three, 13 seconds in four, 11 seconds in episode six and 11 seconds in episode eight, being absent in two, five and eight. The TV Academy music group stands by the nomination.

Scott Feinberg, The Hollywood Reporter

Tourism

In a bit of a shock, despite being the host of the World Cup, the United States actually experienced a year-over-year decline in visitors in June. Total overseas visitors were down 1.8 percent year over year in June to 2.8 million; that is compared to an already-low June 2025 figure, which itself was down 3.4 percent from the same month of 2024. Foreign international air passenger arrivals were flat, moving up just 0.2 percent. Some markets did show up — arrivals from the U.K. were up 17 percent — but overall, the general hesitation to visit the United States at this time appears to have ensured that even this massive global sporting event was a total wash.

Bailey Schulz and Rashaad Jorden, Skift

Space

A new study published in PNAS Nexus extrapolated current trends across 4,400 rockets launched from 1960 to 2025 to determine how inexpensive it will be to yeet something into orbit in the future. The cost of sending a kilogram of payload to orbit was $3,868 last year, down from $87,000 per kilogram in the 1960s and $20,000 per kilogram in the 1970s, and that trend is expected to persist. The study projects a 58 percent decline in payload launch costs by 2030, when it will hit $1,569 per kilogram, and then as low as $273 per kilogram by 2040.

Fred Lewsey, University of Cambridge

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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; SEN 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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