Numlock News: June 3, 2026 • Geomagnetic, Sargassum, Magellanic

Jun 03, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Broadway

Broadway shows producers have been angling to get state-level aid to continue well past the period of time where Broadway was on its back foot following the pandemic-era industry distress. The funding, New York State money, has become controversial as it moves from an economic lifeline to basically an economic development investment. The producers argue that it’s vastly cheaper to launch productions elsewhere, particularly London where there is government support for the theater industry. Critics point out that New York awarded $33.5 million in tax credits to 19 shows this year (13 Broadway, six off-Broadway) of which just two are still running today.

Danielle Muoio Dunn, Bloomberg

Sargassum

May was a record month for sargassum piling up on beaches around the Caribbean, and even more foul-smelling rotting algae is expected to wash up this month. It’s killing wildlife and disrupting tourism. The 38 million metric tons of algae that washed ashore is the largest mass measured since researchers began studying the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt in 2011, completely blowing past the previous record 22 million metric tons logged in June 2022.

Dánica Coto, The Associated Press

Noche De Los Grandes

The livestreamed Mexican AAA wrestling event Noche de los Grandes has become an instant classic, racking up a combined 2.24 million views since being streamed on May 30. The Monterrey match saw the culmination of a year-long storyline in a máscara contra máscara bout — mask vs. mask, where the loser is unmasked before the world in shame forever — between El Grande Americano (Ludwig Kaiser) and The Original El Grande Americano (Chad Gable). AAA, one of the largest professional wrestling promotions in Mexico, was acquired by WWE last year.

Joe Otterson, Variety

Huh?

New York’s hottest club is the sewer system, at least according to three separate surveillance footage videos of people inexplicably entering the sewer system. One video taken on Friday in Williamsburg captures seven people emerging from a maintenance hole in the middle of an intersection bearing shovels and tools and headlamps. Another saw seven people emerging from a maintenance hole at 2 a.m. in Gravesend in Brooklyn, only to head over to parked cars and change into fresh clothes. Those incidents have brought renewed attention to a May 5 video featuring three people in hip waders emerging from a maintenance hole cover on a street in Queens. Authorities are befuddled, but the answer is obvious to anyone who’s sampled the nightlife scene here: The speakeasy trend has gone too far.

Philip Marcelo, The Associated Press

Small Magellanic Cloud

A new paper looks into the movement of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way that is indeed being pulled apart thanks to the Large Magellanic Cloud. The researchers found that the millions of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud are actually moving outward at a speed of 17 kilometers per second; over the course of a few hundred million years — not much in galactic time spans — those stars could be displaced by several thousand lightyears. The phenomenon isn’t just seen on the outskirts of the SMC, but in the central regions as well.

Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam

Biological Clock

New York and Texas are separated by just a single time zone, which is good for the Knicks, as teams on the East Coast tend to perform worse when they head out west to play basketball since the athletes need to process jet lag. The win percentage of Eastern teams playing a road game that tips off at the equivalent of 4:30 to 6:29 p.m. ET is 39.7 percent. When the game is at 10:30 p.m. or later, that drops to 34.9 percent.

Jacob Feldman and Lev Akabas, Sportico

Airbag For The Sun

A new paper published in Space Weather from a small group of space weather scientists has sent waves through the field, arguing that it is indeed possible for humans to build a system that would mitigate the impacts of an otherwise devastating solar storm, a provocative pitch for a “StormWall.” Essentially, a one-in-100 year solar storm on the scale of 1859’s Carrington Event could cause massive damage to the power grids of Earth to the tune of $3 trillion. While forecasting has gotten better and tech has gotten more durable, that’s still a whole lot of possible damage. The proposed countermeasure would be a fleet of satellites that would release gas into space before the solar storm hits Earth, which simulations indicate would cut the intensity of a major event by half, “an airbag in the magnetosphere” in the words of one of the co-authors. The researchers estimated that just 400 tons of material would be enough to cut the strength of a geomagnetic storm by 60 percent.

Paul Voosen, Science

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