Numlock News: June 11, 2026 • Board Games, Tungsten, Whales

Jun 11, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Take A W

The United States and its allies have been largely weaned off Chinese exports of the metal tungsten, which is essential for making ultrahard tools as well as used in semiconductors, electronics and weapons. China has an 80 percent market share for the metal, and has begun to cut off countries aligned with the United States; Japan, for instance, has not imported any Chinese tungsten since February. And while the United States’ last domestic tungsten mining operation ended in 2015, tungsten is still being extracted — not from mines underground but from old garages and scrapyards, with U.S. tungsten scrap now selling for a premium. Tungsten scrap that was going for $40 per pound a year ago hit $167.50 per pound in May thanks to surging demand from allies, with Japan, for instance, importing 1.72 million kilograms of tungsten scrap from the U.S. in the first quarter, a large spike compared to the 2.2 million kilograms imported over all of last year.

Azusa Kawakami, Shunsuke Akagi and Kohei Fujimura, Nikkei Asia

Bikes

Protected bike lanes that physically separate and protect cyclists from motorists go a long way towards incentivizing bike use compare to bike lanes that are just painted on to the asphalt, a new analysis of 72 million Citi Bike trips recorded from 2013 to 2024 found. According to the analysis, adding in any kind of bike lane does promote bike use, but the increase is much more pronounced when the integrity of the bike lane doesn’t just rely on the kindness and generosity of motorists: Citi Bike stations near painted bike lanes and sharrows saw an increase in usage of about 14 percent, while those near newly installed protected bike lanes saw an average increase of 18 percent, good for an additional 379 rides per station per month.

NYU Tandon School of Engineering

Pave Paradise

Risk of flooding in the United Kingdom has increased because people are installing hardscapes into their gardens, with impervious surfaces adding up. Gardens are about five percent of the total land area of Britain, and in London, they’re 41 percent of the land. The total area in England that is defined as permeable enough to absorb rain declined by 173,000 acres from 2001 to 2022. Garden design is an element of that, especially in urban areas, and as paving slabs became a trendy way of making low-maintenance gardens, they’ve made some areas of London more flood-prone.

Olivia Rudgard, Bloomberg

Nostalgia

Food trends have turned decisively nostalgic, with formats and flavors that had long gone out of style making a comeback. For instance, creamsicle flavors are appearing on menus 37 percent more than they had been four years ago, with other phased-out flavors like baked Alaska and ice cream floats also appearing more and more on menus. Some of this is just the industry exploiting the trend cycle; while a dirty martini or frozen yogurt may come off as dated to those who were around for the initial go-round, they sure seem just as new and interesting as chili crisp or Dubai chocolate to a Gen Z consumer who weren’t around the first time.

Deena Shanker, Bloomberg

Cones of Dunshire

A new survey probed how Americans felt about board games, finding that we are a competitive people, with 44 percent of respondents indicating that it’s at least somewhat important to win when one plays a board game. That’s compared to a mysterious eight percent who said it’s “not at all important” if they win. When it comes to which games people play, the classics tend to win out, with Monopoly (81 percent have played at least several times), Checkers (76 percent) and Scrabble (64 percent) coming in as the most-played. Getting deeper into the shelf, 23 percent said they had played Risk at least several times and 25 percent Backgammon; plunging deeper into the specialty board game store crowd, just nine percent had played Catan a few times, eight percent Ticket To Ride and six percent Wingspan.

David Montgomery, YouGov

Marriage

The percentage of people who told the General Social Survey that their marriage is “very happy” has slipped from 67 percent in the late 1980s to 61 percent as of 2024, with a decisive slide following the pandemic. From 1987 to 2013, several relationship dynamics have changed among both married couples and those who cohabitate, with reported levels of fairness within the relationship declining somewhat over the period, the level of disagreement up slightly and the level of interaction sloping downward. One cause of this cited by researchers is people working longer hours in order to make ends meet.

Alvin Chang, The Pudding

Whalefall

A new study published in Nature describes a fascinating undersea site, the largest whale graveyard ever found, a place that spans over 740 miles of seafloor containing at least 485 whale skeletons from across five million years. The Diamantina Fracture Zone extends from the southwestern tip of Australia to the Indian Ocean, and over the course of about 30 dives in the region, researchers kept on finding whale skeletons; 33 fossil samples were dated between 5.26 million and 120,000 years old, preserved thanks to slow sediment accumulation. This has made for a site with a whale-remains density reaching up to 759.5 individuals per square kilometer, indicating that there may be 10 million whale carcasses down there.

Chinese Academy of Sciences and Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

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