Numlock News: March 10, 2026 • Iditarod, Raccoons, Sabres

Mar 10, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Antediluvian

Glacial lakes can form in a few locations — on the surface of glaciers, in valleys to the side of glaciers or at the toe of glaciers — but they become rather dangerous when a lake dammed by ice forms. When that happens, it only takes a shift here or a hot day there before the dam breaks, unleashing a torrent of water. This has been seen repeatedly with a small glacier-dammed lake five miles into the mountains behind the Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau, Alaska. That little lake has caused so many flooding problems that the Army Corps of Engineers is considering a $613 million to $1 billion project to drain it permanently. Alaska’s glacial lakes are expanding 120 percent faster now than they did in the late 80s and 1990s, setting the stage for lots of floods. From 1985 to 2020, ice-dammed lakes in Alaska broke through barriers and drained over 1,150 times. Globally, 15 million people live in areas at risk of glacial lake outburst floods.

Dan McGrath, The Conversation

Look At What They Need To Mimic A Fraction Of Our Power

A new study published in Cell describes the painstaking efforts to simulate the life cycle of a minimal bacterial cell, a major accomplishment. The researchers simulated a living cell at nanoscale resolution, a process that took years of development and accounted for every gene, protein, RNA molecule and chemical reaction that occurred within the cell. The cell was a modified bacterium called Syn3A with under 500 genes in a single strand of DNA. Simulating the entire 105-minute cell cycle took six full days of compute time with multiple GPUs firing.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Rattling

The Buffalo Sabres have, after a wild comeback, become a hockey team that is essentially locked into making the playoffs. This would snap the longest-running playoff-less streak in the NHL, with Buffalo having not made the playoffs since the 2010-11 season — a 14-year drought. Since then, the team has sustained a -580 goal differential and seen an entire generation of players pass through. Current left wing, Zach Benson, wasn’t even six years old when the Sabres last made the playoffs.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Raccoons

A new study published in Animal Behavior found that raccoons solved puzzle boxes even when there wasn’t a food reward at stake, indicating that the animals might actually be curious and not just famously opportunistic. The study involved a multi-access puzzle box with nine possible entry points to food within, some of which were easy, some medium difficulty and others hard. The box featured obstacles like latches and knobs and sliding doors. Even after earning the food within, the raccoons continued to try to open new mechanisms.

University of British Columbia

Downward Slopes

Vail Resorts, one of the two companies that control a large chunk of American ski and snowboarding resorts, is reporting a rough winter. Thanks to low snowfall in the Mountain States where Vail’s footprint is disproportionate, business has been bad, with season-to-date skier visits down 11.9 percent season-over-season through March 1. Initial forecasts of $201 million to $276 million in net income were slashed to $144 million to $190 million for the year.

Allison Pohle and Kelly Cloonan, The Wall Street Journal

Trucking

Amazon’s costs to ship its deliveries reached $102.7 billion in 2025, up from $95.8 billion the year before and well above the $83.5 billion notched in 2022. That said, efficiency has also increased considerably since then. In 2025, Amazon’s shipping costs were 17.5 percent of its North American and International sales, lower than the high of 19.2 percent notched in 2022. The company is well on its way to becoming the second-largest deliverer of packages. While the sprawling logistics operation currently exists only to support its own online e-commerce operation, it’s worth remembering that AWS originally existed entirely to support Amazon’s own online e-commerce operation before it started selling to everyone else. And AWS became a massive business in its own right.

Thomas Black, Bloomberg

Iditarod

The 54th running of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race kicked off Sunday, to be run along the 938-mile route connecting Seward to Nome. The field has averaged around 60 mushers over the past five decades, with the largest field assembled being 96 mushers in 2008. However, the field has shrunk considerably, down to a low of 33 in 2023 and 2025. This year will see 34 mushers competing, as well as three others who are not eligible for the championship because they’re rich cosplayers who were allowed outside help. The upside of that is the race purse was boosted by the participation trophy crowd, so the winner’s getting $80,000, up from the $57,000 paid to the top musher last year.

Mark Thiessen, The Associated Press

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