Numlock News: June 16, 2026 • Mines, COBOL, Pufferfish

Jun 16, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Minesweeper

While the United States and Iran are reportedly approaching a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, it will realistically be some time before the number of ships that pass through the Strait daily — currently around 12 to 15 vessels per day — recovers back to the 120 to 140 vessels from before the war began. One reason is mines, which naval forces have placed at some locations in the Strait. An operation by conventional minesweepers and underwater drones to clear the Strait could take 40 to 50 days before the insurance, shipping and oil companies are satisfied that it’s sufficiently safe to sail. Given that a supertanker and its cargo of crude oil are worth about $300 million, war risk underwriters can understandably get skittish even at a whiff of mines.

Jonathan Saul, Reuters

Pufferfish

There are about 200 species of pufferfish that live in the warm waters of the world, and currently three can be found in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, among them the silver-cheeked pufferfish. As water temperatures warm, the population of silver-cheeked Lagocephalus sceleratus has exploded in the waters off of Greece, and they are wreaking havoc on the fishing industry. Native to the Indian and Pacific oceans and the Red Sea, the fish made its way to the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal, and has been causing damage to nets and eating the catch of fishermen off Greece’s coast. Ordinarily, invasive species can go directly onto menus. However, pufferfish have a deadly toxin that makes them inedible, which removes that option of population control. Furthermore technically a pufferfish is considered class one waste, the same tier as industrial waste, making them annoying to dispose of on top of everything else. Instead, the fishing industry is lobbying the government to pay the agencies to catch and kill the species.

Will Vassilopoulos and Angelos Tzortzinis, Agence France-Presse

Microbiomes

Researchers analyzed the oral and gut microbiomes of 430 people living in 230 households, identifying microbial strains and figuring out what was common across people. Overall, cohabitating individuals shared 19 percent of their gut microbiome and 26 percent of their oral microbiome strains. That’s significantly higher than the commonality of microbiomes overall; among individuals in different households, there was just six percent shared gut microbiome and zero percent shared oral microbiome. The oral microbiome is probably from kissing: romantic partners shared 44 percent of their oral microbiome.

Julia Grimmett, Cell Press

Power

A new poll found that billionaires, CEOs, men and white Americans are seen as having the most power in the United States, with 75 percent of respondents saying that billionaires have a lot of political power, compared to just eight percent who said the same thing about workers. In general, 64 percent said workers should have more power, 54 percent said small-business owners should, 51 percent said women should have more power and 45 percent said the same about both scientists and public-school teachers. Overall, 62 percent of respondents said that billionaires should have less political power.

David Montgomery, YouGov

Cruises

China’s government wants to improve the cruise industry serving the country, seeing it as a pathway towards tourism growth. Globally, there were 37.2 million cruise passengers last year, of whom just 1.14 million hailed from China, good for about 800 passengers per million people. Globally, the average is around 4,600 cruise passengers per million people, and in the United States, it’s about 60,000 passengers per million. China could be a beneficiary of the cruise book; While more than 90 percent of cruise ships in operation are built in Europe, China handles 60 percent of global orders for merchant ships in general. Learn how to install a Lido Deck on one of those suckers and who knows what might happen.

Kohei Fujimura, Nikkei Asia

COBOL Cowboys

The last of the original generation of programmers and architects of IBM’s Common Business-Oriented Language are retiring, and that’s an issue for many state and local agencies that rely on mainframes built from that codebase for taxes, licensing, justice and benefits. The systems are stable and consistent and work well, so they’ve often never been updated, but the shrinking pool of specialists who can keep them running is a point of concern. According to IBM, 89 percent of state governments use mainframes, and thousands of agencies across states and localities rely on the systems.

Jennifer Nelson, Route Fifty

Fragmentation

The upper stage of a Zhuque-2E commercial rocket made by Chinese company LandSpace broke up in heavy traffic orbit, and anywhere from 100 to 150 pieces of debris are now in orbit between 208 miles and 263 miles up, at an inclination of 54.5 degrees to the equator. The debris might be a threat to Starlink satellites, which tend to be at that lower altitude. The good news is that most of the broken pieces will probably fall to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere within a few months.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

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