Numlock News: June 24, 2026 • Deep Ultraviolet, Macaques, Mayan

Jun 24, 2026

By Walt Hickey

ASML

ASML is the company that makes the machines that make semiconductors, and it has had a pretty stellar couple of years. Through the 1990s, chipmakers used visible light to carve transistors, and in the mid 1990s they switched to deep ultraviolet, which brought the wavelength of the light down from 400 nanometers to 193 nanometers. Nine years ago, ASML rolled out machines that used extreme-ultraviolet light radiation and shoot lasers at tens of thousands of times per second that can get transistor features down to a resolution of 13 nanometers. These machines cost over $100 million apiece, and semiconductor manufacturers snapped them up. Now ASML has got a new machine, one that has a resolution of eight nanometers, selling to chip fabs for $400 million each. The Dutch company is responsible for 90 percent of all chip lithography tools worldwide.

Clive Thompson, MIT Technology Review

Host With The Most

Team USA has surpassed expectations at the World Cup, pulling off two wins with a +5 goal differential to start the tournament. That is the best two-game start for the U.S. at the event since 1930, when the team was up +6, a bygone era where presumably the “hydration breaks” involved restorative, invigorating, nutritious cigarettes. Based on their pregame Elo ratings, the U.S. is beating expectations by 2.42 goals per game, the eighth-best showing in the group stage in the history of the World Cup.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Maya

Researchers studying remains at multiple Maya burial sites in Belize dating to the Classic period (250 to 900 AD) found genomic data related to 107 distinct individuals from 341 samples. What’s most interesting is that for 24 of those individuals, skeletal elements were found at two places: in the Plaza Tomb, below a house at a site known as Muklebal Tzul, and in Bats’ub cave, 26.5 kilometers away. To be specific, that cave contained 226 teeth from at least 24 different people arranged near the body of an adult woman; genomic data from the skeleton indicated she was the ancestor of some of the people interred in the elite tombs. The study was shared on the repository bioRxiv, but you can bet that I forwarded this one to my dear colleagues and research collaborators at the Proceedings of the Society for Tooth Fairy Research.

Chris Simms, New Scientist

Frogs

The FrogWatch USA program is overseen by the Akron Zoo, and sees volunteers around the United States surveying frogs and toads to gather information that helps researchers determine the range and population of amphibian species. One place that this research happens is Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, which is a site of the census — 70 acres of biodiversity in the middle of the Boston metro area, and the site of multiple such citizen science projects as a result.

Cara Giaimo, bioGraphic

P.O.’d

As of the most recent data available from 2018, there are 21 million P.O. boxes in the United States. In areas where mailbox home delivery is not viable — rural areas that might be relatively off-grid and are expensive to service for the USPS — the local post office generally arranges for citizens to get free P.O. boxes at the nearest post office. Of those 21 million P.O. boxes, about 1.3 million of them are free, and about 60 percent of those free boxes are in the West. While those free boxes cost the post office $39 million per year, the logistical math ought to work out given the negated cost of delivery; that said, for a number of communities, the post office not only does not offer home delivery within city limits, but also charges people to get a box, which has infuriated residents.

Susan Shain, High Country News

Primates

In November 2025, the CDC decided to phase out monkey research, and the scientists who were working with the animals at the time — which were mostly used in HIV-prevention studies — hoped they would either be transferred to other biomedical programs or retired to one of the seven National Primate Research Centers. Instead, the CDC’s leadership plowed ahead with a plan to send 162 rhesus and pigtail macaques en masse to a sanctuary in Texas that’s home to 250 primates of many species, which caused concern because the rushed timeline would run counter to the ordinary policy of slowly integrating new monkeys into large social groups to minimize harms. The CDC has backtracked somewhat and put out a contract opportunity regarding the monkeys’ eventual destination. The issue, though, is that the contract opportunity is specifically written so that only its preferred destination would actually qualify.

David Grimm, Science

Hydration Breaks

The decision to add “water breaks” to the World Cup outside of the ordinary halftime — even for teams competing in domed, air-conditioned stadiums — had more than a whiff of greed about it, and reports indicate that the added commercial breaks are indeed making broadcaster Fox a fortune. According to media buyers familiar with the amout that hydration break ads are selling for — between $200,000 and $750,000 depending on the matchup and the stakes of the game — the six minutes of hydration breaks per game are adding up to $2.5 million and $9 million per game. This means that the water breaks are reaping the broadcaster at least $250 million, and possibly $500 million to $600 million, on top of the ordinary commercial breaks.

Steven Zeitchik and Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter

If you subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! It’s fun, and supporters keep this thing ad-free. This is the best way to support a thing you like to read:

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Overflowing Cups · Entangled States · Landslide · Mycorrhizal · James Bond · Divination Equipment · Planet Money ·