Numlock News: June 22, 2026 • Pumice, GoPro, Gim

Jun 22, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back! Hope you enjoyed the long weekend.

Toy Story

Toy Story 5 made $160 million in North America, good for the second-largest opening weekend in history behind Incredibles 2. With another $152 million abroad, the global haul of $312 million is likely just the start of a solid run for the movie, given the relative lack of movies competing for families right at the start of summer. With how this kind of animation legs out, it would be a surprise if the new release doesn’t beat out Toy Story 4’s $1.07 billion.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Mogami

Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force has been sailing the Mogami-class frigate since 2022, and newly-relaxed laws regarding arms exports has many allied countries eyeing the Mistubishi Heavy Industries vessel with some envy. Frigates are the bread-and-butter of naval defense strategies these days, getting them right isn’t always easy; the American next-generation frigate program has been troubled, with the first FF(X) frigate costing the Navy $1.4 billion. By comparison, the Mogami-class costs $710 million, and while that’s more expensive than Britain’s Inspiration-class frigate (which sells for $330 million), the Mogami-class can be operated by a crew of just 90 thanks to ample automation, down from the typical 100 to 140 personnel needed to operate the Mogami-class’ peers. Australia’s buying three of them and then cut a deal to build eight domestically. New Zealand and Indonesia are also in the market, and Japan’s offered Indonesia and the Philippines older vessels.

Jason Douglas and Junko Fukutome, The Wall Street Journal

Deep Synoptic Array

Construction will soon begin on the Deep Synoptic Array, a telescope spread over 120 square miles of desert in Nevada, made up of 1,650 20-foot-diameter dish-shaped antennas. It’s got a unique funding structure — Caltech is leading the project with funding from Schmidt Sciences, a new philanthropic venture pushing money into astrophysics — and it’s going to collect an enormous volume of data that will be combined and processed in real time. This will allow the DSA to survey about 100 times faster than other radio observatories. In a somewhat fascinating illustration of the nature of the work, the project will rely on both Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs to handle the data processing, as well as thousands of modified cake pans purchased from bakeware manufacturer Fat Daddio to produce the feeds that convert electromagnetic waves into signals.

Joseph Howlett, Scientific American

Vending

The number of operating vending machines in Japan fell about 20 percent from 2013 to 2025, dropping to about 1.95 million units. The largest operator of the machines — which are seemingly everywhere in the country, and contain a much wider arrangement of products than vending machines in other countries — is Coca-Cola, followed by Suntory Beverage, which has 340,000 vending machines. Because products sold in vending machines tend to be a little more expensive than what you’d buy at a more typical retailer, inflation can be a real strain on the business, and annual sales volume per machine is down to 207 cases, off 60 percent from the peak in 1996. Suntory is eyeing new ways to use all that hardware in the field, and has settled on targeting anime and pop fans with on-demand printing of trading cards and similar blind-box products.

Tsugumi Kim, Nikkei Asia

GoPro

The California-based company GoPro has shed a large chunk of market share to rivals DJI and Insta360, Chinese companies that entered the action camera market and have since devoured it. GoPro essentially invented the market niche in 2002, and by 2022, it still held a 75 percent market share. Now, the company is disclosing concerns about its ability to continue operating, as its market share has fallen calamitously over the past three years, dropping to 18 percent, with DJI and Insta360 now combining for about 80 percent of the business on the backs of superior editing features and newer, fresher models. Naturally, GoPro is looking into that well-worn pivot that so many American consumer technology companies pursue once competition from abroad has eaten their lunch: sell it to the Pentagon, which can’t buy Chinese tech.

Kinling Lo, Rest of World

Gim

The Korean company that owns Bibigo is breaking ground in August on a new land-based plant in Cheonan for the large-scale cultivation of gim, which is a roasted seaweed that is important to Korean cuisine. As Korean cuisine grows in popularity abroad, it has put pressure on gim supplies due to higher demand and, thanks to rising sea temperatures, less consistent supply. Land-based seaweed farms will also allow gim to be harvested year-round rather than just in winter. It’s hard to overstate how quickly Korean cuisine has become popular; Bibigo recorded 1,100 percent growth in U.S. retail sales from 2020 to 2024. And listen, I know how difficult an engineering problem it can be to successfully cultivate and breed a massive amount of algae in a sun-drenched pool in a bustling, historic urban center; needless to say, our guys in Washington have experience in the matter and stand ready to advise on this challenge.

Sarah Zimmerman, Food Dive

Admiralty Islands

In early May, satellites detected an underwater volcanic eruption in the Bismark Sea off the coast of Papua New Guinea in the Pacific. Pumice, a stone that results from volcanic eruptions, can form rafts that persist for months or even years before eventually sinking. This part of the ocean isn’t well mapped, so we don’t know precisely where the volcano is, but the eruptions appear to be ongoing. And now, communities in the Admiralty Islands are getting inundated by rafts of pumice stone that has drifted from the eruption site and clogged up several coastlines, with layers of pumice reportedly several meters thick blanketing the shore on Lou Island and Baluan Island. Fragments have been found on the coast of Manus Island as well, which is 125 kilometers northwest of the volcano.

Lindsey Doermann, NASA

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