Numlock News: June 26, 2026 • Vesuvius, Arctic Circle, Nanostacking

Jun 26, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Translation

Japan’s cultural industries make a lot of their money abroad, but slow or absent translations of that output continue to fuel a manga and anime piracy scene. It has gotten sufficiently bad to the point where the government is looking into ways to speed up translation efforts. Specifically, the Japanese government is weighing subsidies for 15 companies intended to expand the overseas market for Japanese entertainment, with eligible companies including publishers, streaming companies and game and IP companies like Bandai Namco. A report of what’s under consideration points to an 11.5 billion yen (US$71 million) subsidy intended to cover half the cost of overseas promotion, which includes translating works into foreign languages.

Francesco Cacciatore, Polygon

Northern Sea Route

In 2009, Germany’s Beluga Shipping was the first to complete a commercial voyage along the Northern Sea Route, which takes ships from the Pacific ports in East Asia to Europe by going up and over Russia rather than around the Cape of Good Hope or through the Suez Canal. The pro is that it’s much faster and can be done in 20 days rather than the 40 days it takes through the Suez or the 55 days around the Cape, but the con is that it’s frozen solid most of the year, and when it’s not, the route is still pretty risky. Still, by 2018 Maersk managed the first container ship transit, and as of 2025, transit cargo volumes reached 3.2 million metric tons across 23 container voyages, up from 15 voyages the prior year. Interest is up, but the Arctic Circle still is perilous; among vessels over 100GT, there were 253 machinery damage or failure incidents in Arctic Circle waters from 2016 to 2025, 67 wreckings or groundings, 54 fires or explosions and 29 collisions. Factor in other concerns — Russian sanctions, icebreaker availability, the fact that Frankenstein canonically lives up there — and it’s still far from a standard route.

Malte Humpert, gCaptain

Nanostacking

IBM revealed a new prototype chip that it claims will enable Moore’s Law to continue to stand, making faster and more efficient chips possible thanks to a promising new strategy of jamming even more transistors into that chip. Transistors are already so small that quantum mechanics has become an issue, given they’re down to a few dozen nanometers in size. However, IBM found its approach can do as much as 50 percent more work in the same amount of time thanks to a layering of the transistors in a vertical stack, with electrons moving through channels that are made of three nanosheets, each 15 atoms thick and spaced nine nanometers apart.

Sophia Chen, MIT Technology Review

Vesuvius

The Library of Herculaneum was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, an event that also destroyed the city of Pompeii. Scorched papyrus scrolls from the library that were too fragile to open physically are now being unwrapped digitally and revealing lost books. The Vesuvius Challenge has managed to digitally unwrap 1.5 meters of text written across 22 columns from a two-centimeter-wide scroll that discusses ethics and may have been written by the Stoic Chrysippus. While the eruption contributed somewhat to the knowledge of humans at the time — Pliny the Elder’s groundbreaking experiments in the field of emergency response during the eruption have led to tried-and-true wisdom that stands to this day such as “don’t take a boat to the site of a volcanic eruption and take a nap at your friend’s house” — thanks to these discoveries, it’s contributing even more now.

Hayley Bennett, New Scientist

Private Brands

Grocery store private brands — the ones that up until a few years ago were called “generics” — have been a solid source of growth for the industry, as stores increase their supply and quality of in-house brands and consumers looking to save money on food amid inflationary pressures are willing to make the switch. Overall, private brand dollar sales grew 2.8 percent over the 52 weeks ending March 22, outpacing the 2.6 percent dollar growth in name brands, with unit sales for private brands up 0.6 percent compared to the 0.2 percent growth in name brand sales.

Catherine Douglas Moran, Food Dive

Parking Lots

Traffic collision data collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration undercounts people injured or killed in automobile collisions because the data only includes serious crashes that take place on public streets. This means that traffic fatalities in parking lots and driveways are not actually tallied, and are actually a bit of a black box in general, given that nobody is keeping track of them. According to a 2021 study from AAA, 20 percent of all collisions in the United States happen in parking lots, and a 2021 estimate from NHTSA put fatalities from “non-traffic crashes” that occurred on private property at about 12 percent of all official pedestrian deaths in 2021.

David Zipper, Bloomberg

Carbon Capture

Carbon capture has been a fixture of research and development in green tech for decades at this point, in no small part because the oil industry keeps pushing it, but while solar and battery tech has ramped up from theory to R&D to commercial to industrial scale, carbon capture is pretty much still stuck on theory. In 2008, the International Energy Agency estimated that we would have to bury 1.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year by 2025 to avoid dangerous levels of warming, and U.N. analysis puts the figure at six billion tons every year by the middle of the century. This has not happened even a little bit: currently, all the carbon capture in the whole world is permanently burying less CO2 than one large power plant emits annually.

Kate Worth and Lucas Waldron, ProPublica

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