Numlock News: June 25, 2026 • Wagyu, Slate, Kites

Jun 25, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Slate

The average new vehicle sold in the United States in May went for $49,220, with the typical small and midsized pickup going for $43,044, and the average new electric vehicle going for $54,532. Slate Auto, an American automobile manufacturer backed by Jeff Bezos, sees a niche that is not being served: people who don’t want to pay 50 grand for any of those things. The company announced it will launch its new electric truck at the price point of $24,950, fulfilling a promise to launch a vehicle squarely in the mid-$20,000 range. Be warned, the baseline Slate is going to be rather blank, with no touchscreen, speakers or automatic windows, and it will have no autonomous setting, though there will be plenty of à la carte customizations. It’s an interesting bet, one that is less on electric trucks in particular but rather that the American vehicle owner has a much lower appetite for added bells and whistles than the auto industry currently believes.

Rani Molla, The Verge

Kites

The red kite — Milvus milvus — is native to Western Europe, and has stable populations in Sweden, Germany, France and Southern Italy. However, in Spain, populations have plummeted since the 1970s, and are gone from some regions entirely. The nonprofit Acción por el Mundo Salvaje has embarked on a project to bolster the population by importing birds from England, where the birds are doing rather well, in a move that is actually only possible thanks to a conservation project in the other direction that started in the 1990s. Britain’s population of red kites was down to 160 breeding pairs in 1995, but thanks to a project that imported birds from Spain when the Spanish population was stable, rose to at least 4,600 breeding pairs as of 2023. The U.K. is returning the favor, and while the program to reintroduce kites into Extremadura poses challenges, drawing on the now-stable population of U.K. kites will hopefully help establish a foothold.

Greg Noone, bioGraphic

Turtles

A new study tracked sea turtles embarking on sea journeys of over 1,000 kilometers that take them from their nesting grounds in the remote Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean to their foraging grounds in the Seychelles and Saya de Malha Bank. It’s an impressive journey, one that takes 27.5 days to complete on average and goes from one generally remote outcrop of islands to another, which is an impressive feat of submersible navigation. What’s their secret? According to the study, the turtles are actually pretty much winging it, finding that they tended to just aim in a direction and swim for a while, veering off course constantly and occasionally reorienting to get back on track, yet another instance in which Finding Nemo was basically a documentary.

Phie Jacobs, Science

A5

In April, 76.4 percent of beef traded in wholesale markets in Japan was rated A5, the highest possible grade of Wagyu beef. That’s up from 17.5 percent of beef carcasses rated A5 seen 15 years ago, the result of a steady increase in quality and breeding, and producers chasing the high prices that A5 wagyu commands, which tends to be 10 percent to 20 percent higher than A4 wagyu. That said, a fascinating economic situation is unfolding, as there’s so much of a glut of A5 on the market now that the price premium of the increasingly uncommon A4 is — owing to supply and demand and consumer inflationary pressures — actually resulting in a shrinking price premium for A5 over A4. Basically, Japanese consumers are going to A4 because it’s cheaper and inflation has stung, but producers have put a lot of A5 out there, and they can only export so much of it; wagyu beef exports of 12,628 metric tons in 2025 was up 17 percent year over year, and triple the pre-pandemic level. As a result, the price gap between A4 and A5 is now down to just 6.5 percent, the lowest on record.

Koki Kubota, Nikkei Asia

Forward Of You

Another hockey romance television show has skyrocketed towards the top of the charts, with this new series — Off Campus on Prime Video, based on the book series of the same name — expanding on the steamy hockey romance trend that Heated Rivalry brought into the mainstream, using the frankly baffling romantic tactic of “adding women.” Hey, if that’s what gets you going, it’s a free country. That’s prompted a surge in sales for Elle Kennedy’s book series, upon which the tv series is based, with weekly sales of The Deal peaking at 50,575 print units in the week ending May 30, up 970 percent from the week ending May 9. With sales of that first novel prompting sales of the sequels as well, year-to-date print sales for Kennedy’s work is already up 269 percent compared to the full year of 2025.

Sam Spratford, Publishers Weekly

Toys

The latest report from the Japanese Toy Association saw the domestic market for character merchandise and toys derived from entertainment growing 9.3 percent to 665 billion yen (US$4.1 billion) for the year ending March 2026. Categories with IP ties are now 57 percent of the domestic toy market, up 13 points over the past seven years, with card games and trading cards accounting for 29 percent of the market. One category to keep an eye on is plushies, which grew 38 percent year over year. This is a crucial benchmark, as the next edition’s April ’26 to March ’27 data will include systemic shocks like the new Haikyuu! movie and of course, Me Going To Japan Back In May And Kind Of Going A Little Overboard At Mandarake.

Richardson Handjaja, Animenomics

Antediluvian or Anti-diluvian, Makes No Difference

Counties that were in the top 10 percent of the U.S. when it came to the share of homes that are very vulnerable to flooding saw a bit of an exodus from mid-2024 to mid-2025, as the costs of insuring vulnerable properties and the risks of living in them appear to be having an effect on movement in the aggregate. Those high-risk counties lost a net 63,357 residents over the period, double the outflow (heh) of the previous 12-month period. On the other side of the ledger, the counties with low flood risk gained a net of 70,000 residents.

Leslie Kaufman, Bloomberg

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