Numlock News: June 18, 2026 • Katalyst, Barnacle, The Boys

Jun 18, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Hull

Demand for specialized teams of divers to remove biofouling from the hulls of shipping vessels has surged on the news that the United States and Iran may have come to terms on the conflict that has snarled trade through the Strait of Hormuz. The fees commanded by crews who go underwater to scrape barnacles from ships have jumped 60 percent, from $5,000 to $8,000 per ship in the Persian Gulf. Currently, around 600 vessels remain trapped in the Persian Gulf, going on 16 weeks into the conflict as ports tend to ban barnacle-encrusted vessels from mooring because the dense barnacle structures can harbor invasive species.

Stella Mackler, Bloomberg

Emmys

This year at the Primetime Emmy Awards, there have been 1,573 submissions across 17 performer categories, a decline from the 1,706 submissions sent in in 2025. The Boys and Saturday Night Live submitted the most contenders for acting prizes, with each submitting 28 contenders, followed by 24 submissions from The Pitt. While studios tend to pick who they’ll submit for a push at the award shows, technically there’s nothing stopping actors or their representatives from self-submitting; for instance, nine of 24 acting contenders for The Pitt were self-submitting. Often that works: when Game of Thrones ended in 2019, the show bagged 32 nominations, and three of those — Alfie Allen, Gwendoline Christie and Carice van Houten — were self-submitted outside the studio’s awards strategy.

Clayton Davis, Variety

Champs

This past weekend saw the conclusion to both the NBA and NHL seasons in massive, long-awaited victories for long-suffering franchises, and audiences tuned in. On Sunday, the 2026 Stanley Cup Final’s sixth and last game in which the Carolina Hurricanes beat the Vegas Golden Knights drew 5.9 million viewers on average, the largest audience since 2019, peaking at 7.2 million viewers in the final minutes. The series averaged 5.2 million viewers, which was also the best viewership since 2019. Saturday, though, blew that out of the water, as the decisive fifth game of the NBA Finals averaged 24.5 million viewers and peaked at 33 million viewers. The series averaged 20.6 million viewers, the best since 1998, when NASCAR impresario and baseball legend Michael Jordan was apparently playing.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter and Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Paywall

A new analysis out of Notre Dame looked into the behavior of 209.2 million page views of a major United States newspaper’s website, and found that while 59.2 percent of readers who hit a paywall left the site immediately, the practice of paywalling nevertheless had a significant effect on revenue. Following the paywall, 18 percent shifted to free content on the site, while one in 10 managed to bypass the paywall, presumably through either the classic Jedi mind trick (clearing cookies) or the ol’ lockpicking trick (refreshing and pressing ESC until you clip through the wall). Still, those two out of every 1,000 viewers who bypassed the paywall the right way — a credit card — add up, and paywalls act as a significant nudge, with readers who encounter a paywall being 84 times as likely to subscribe as those who do not. Anyway,

Shannon Roddel, University of Notre Dame

Football Fever

The 2026 FIFA World Cup has, within just four days, become as popular in the United States as the 2022 FIFA World Cup was on its final day, according to a new survey that tracked how much people reported having conversations about the cup in either year. In 2022, a week prior to the World Cup starting, just 7.2 percent of Americans had talked about it, 9.4 percent had on the day it started and by the very last day of the 2022 World Cup, 26.4 percent of Americans had talked soccer. This year, as the U.S. hosts, interest is far higher: A week before the tournament, 21.7 percent were into it, by kickoff day 24.8 percent had talked about it and just five days in, 27.1 percent have discussed it.

Rishad Dsouza, YouGov

Geoengineering

While much of the conversation about atmospheric solar geoengineering has been entirely theoretical — dispersing reflective aerosols into the sky to reflect sunlight rather than absorb its heat makes sense on paper — the actual practicalities of that kind of venture are still science fiction, and whether it’s the utopian or dystopian kind of science fiction is furthermore in question. A lab at the University of Chicago is attempting to hammer down some of those engineering variables into constants. However, they’re running into trouble designing an aircraft that could actually get the material to required altitudes, in the right places, to meaningfully reduce warming. One conceptual aircraft design considered by the lab would require a fleet of 270 to disperse a million metric tons of material annually, which would be good enough to reduce global surface temperatures by 0.26 degrees Celsius.

James Temple, MIT Technology Review

Swift

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was launched by NASA in 2004 to a 600-kilometer orbit. Since then, it has fallen to 370 kilometers, and while NASA had originally anticipated that the telescope could function well into the 2030s, as it stands — thanks to a peak in the Sun’s activity that pushed it downward by creating extra drag — it could fall into the atmosphere by the end of the year. That’s a big loss, as Swift has already notched its fair share of astronomy wins, with the observatory responsible for discovering the most powerful gamma ray burst ever recorded, the BOAT, in 2022. This has prompted NASA to roll the bones on a promising mission, hiring Katalyst Space Technologies in 2024 for $30 million to build a LINK rescue craft that will, within a few weeks, launch, attempt to catch up to Swift, grab it and then boost it into a higher orbit, adding years of life to the telescope.

Daniel Clery, Science

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