Numlock News: July 2, 2026 • Atlatl, Subnautica, Minions

Jul 02, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend! We’re off until Monday in observation of the holiday.

Walter Mitty

A new study asked respondents if they thought they would be able to handle a situation presented to them, finding that 70 percent said they could pass a U.S. citizenship test, 55 percent said they could perform the Heimlich maneuver successfully, 38 percent could do a random stranger’s job for a day, 33 percent could survive a week alone in the wilderness and 31 percent thought they could deliver a baby in an emergency. In all but that last scenario, men were considerably more likely than women to think that they could pull it off. There are some scenarios that most people concede they couldn’t do, but nevertheless a contingent of confidents do think they’d manage: 15 percent think they’d survive a week lost at sea on a life raft, 10 percent think they could navigate to a destination using only the stars, nine percent could correctly identify whether a wild mushroom is safe to eat and 18 percent actually think they could safely land a passenger aircraft in an emergency guided by air traffic control.

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

Yellow

This week sees a new edition of the predominant cinematic exploration of the thorny notions such as the banality of evil, the ability to defy one’s nature and deviate from the predestined arc of one’s fate, comparative ethics and moral disengagement related to both moral agency as well as the social cognitive theory of morality. All of that culminates in Minions & Monsters from animator Illumination, which is projected to bring in $80 million in North America. This entry in the franchise, which foregrounds the inherent moral relativism of the modern world and is perhaps American society’s sole populist contemplation of Marx's theory of alienation as first articulated in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, has become an Independence Day weekend staple, with Minions: The Rise of Gru and Despicable Me 4 making $123 million and $122 million, respectively, in the frame.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Atlatl

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences adjusts the timeline of weapons use of the atlatl, a spear-throwing device that had long been linked to the Clovis culture in North America, which existed from 13,340 to 12,710 years ago. The study compiled 66 radiocarbon dates from atlatl specimens, all of which ranged from 9,300 to 6,100 years old, and used optimal linear estimation to determine that the first appearance of the atlatl in western North America was probably 9,996 years ago, which would situate its development after the Clovis culture. This is particularly interesting because it would imply that the atlatl was not brought over from the Old World to the New World, but instead was an instance of technological convergent evolution.

Krystal Kasal, Phys.org

Tungsten

The Dolphin Mine in Australia is the highest-grade large tungsten deposit outside of China, and coincidentally has a habit of restarting ahead of major wars given the necessity of tungsten in weapons applications. It opened in 1917 and shut down three years later, started up again in 1938, faltered but then saw new demand ahead of the Korean and Vietnam Wars and then shut down in 1990 for good (12 months after the fall of the Berlin Wall). Anyway, now that the cost of a metric ton of 88.5 percent ammonium paratungstate jumped from $343 at the beginning of the year to over $3,000 today, the mine — which incidentally just reopened — is doing great, with each container of tungsten it ships out worth about $2 million.

David Fickling, Bloomberg

Subnautica 2

Last summer, video game publisher Krafton Inc. fired the CEO of Unknown Worlds, the studio responsible for the smash-hit game Subnautica and which was ready to publish Subnautica 2. The firing went to court, as Krafton allegedly did it to cheat the leadership team out of incentive bonuses they would have been owed for releasing the game on schedule. The fired CEO prevailed in court, and Subnautica 2 went on to sell over four million copies since release in May; the developers will now be “compensated significantly more” than the $250 million bonus originally agreed to.

Jason Schreier, Bloomberg

Battery

Homeowners in the United States installed 673 megawatts of battery storage in the first three months of 2026, a new record that is all the more interesting because it happened even after the federal government stripped the incentives that had previously been fueling the rise in solar installs. Most of the installations were in California (375 megawatts) and Hawaii (130 megawatts), which both incentivize battery installations at the state level. California installed 1.2 megawatts of residential storage for every one megawatt of solar. Hawaii offered homeowners a one-time $400 cash incentive for every kilowatt of battery storage added.

Summer Maxwell, Bloomberg

PSA

Last June, facing down a seemingly insurmountable backlog that could not be reduced if their mailbox stayed open, the trading card evaluation and grading company PSA announced they must shut down their Value grading tier given a 10 million card submission backlog. After that 45-day window for customers to send in the cards they’d already paid to have evaluated, that backlog rose to 14 million card submissions. After a year of effort, PSA reported this week that they have made a dent in the backlog, which currently stands at 12 million units, and that the team continues to work overtime and weekends to ensure progress. Trading cards of all kinds — games, sports and so on — became enormously popular during the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, and the industry that supports and appraises them is still dealing with the surge.

Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICV2

This week in the Sunday Edition, I spoke to Dave Infante over at Fingers, the newsletter about drinking in America. Dave’s newsletter is fantastic. I’ve been reading it for years, and it’s just a great deep dive into the fascinating liquor industry, which has been pervasively in the news lately. We talked the World Cup’s alcohol consumption, booze bans across borders and history. Dave’s actually running a great sale right now, give it a look!

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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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