Numlock News: March 12, 2026 • Gaia20ehk, House of Lords, MSCHF

Mar 12, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Nitrogen

U.S. farmers are currently making their fertilizer purchases ahead of planting season, only to be shellacked by a skyrocketing price of fertilizer. Ammonia is produced from natural gas, which in turn is converted into nitrogen fertilizers. With the Strait of Hormuz non-navigable and the large LNG processing facilities of the Gulf essentially offline, fertilizer prices are through the roof. Urea is now selling for $579.75 per ton, up 25 percent from the end of February. The U.S. imports 97 percent of its potassium, 18 percent of its nitrogen and 13 percent of its phosphate. The high costs may push farmers away from corn and towards soybeans, with the U.S. Farm Report analysts estimating that up to one million to 1.5 million acres may flip this spring.

Tyne Morgan, Ag Web

Worlds Collide

A star called Gaia20ehk, about 11,000 light-years from Earth, was found to exhibit some strange behavior upon review of old telescope data. The otherwise stable main-sequence star began flickering in 2016, when it experienced three significant dips in brightness. Then, in 2021, it did something incredibly weird and began flickering constantly, which simply isn’t something that happens to stars like our sun. The theory is that the flickering came from large quantities of rocks and dust, and that the origin of that debris was two planets colliding, according to the analysis published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Now that we know what such an event might look like, it’s thought that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory might be able to identify 100 such new impacts over the next 10 years.

William Poor, University of Washington

The Long Game

The House of Lords has existed for 700 years and currently has over 800 members, of whom roughly one out of 10 are hereditary peers, which means that they got a spot in an actual legislature because of who their daddy was, and who his daddy was and so on. That was the main way one got into the House of Lords until the 1950s, when “life peers” were added — essentially, retired politicians or notables appointed by the government. In 1999, the government got rid of most of the 750 hereditary peers but left 92 in the chamber temporarily. Even though they didn’t do anything to earn that money, a few dedicated and sufficiently nihilistic aristocrats can still wreak havoc on a representative democracy when sufficiently ticked off. (Examples of this happening are left as an exercise for the reader.) Now, 25 years on, those hereditaries are poised to get kicked out at the end of the current Parliament session this spring, though a few will be recycled into life peers.

Jill Lawless, The Associated Press

Wednesday

The NFL, which has already spread from games on Thanksgiving to games on Black Friday, is considering adding a Wednesday night game on Thanksgiving Eve as soon as this upcoming season. Wednesday has been a dead space for the NFL, generally speaking, with only five games played on a Wednesday over the course of eight decades of play. Three of those happened in the 2020s — two Christmas games and a pandemic-era thrice-postponed game — another was to avoid a President’s address to the DNC in 2012, and then the prior time before that was 1948.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

MSCHF

The art collective MSCHF is on the verge finishing of a morally bracing piece, Our Cow Angus. Two years ago, 404 buyers bought shares of a calf named Angus, who has lived on a farm since. Each of those owners has a stake in Angus — 400 paid $35 each and will get a three-pack of hamburgers, while four paid $1,200 each for leather handbags and a higher share count. Unless 50 percent of the stakeholders relent by Friday, the photogenic cow will be butchered and sent to those buyers. With just hours to go and many attempting to persuade owners to forgo their payments, and just 33.5 percent of shares pledged to Angus alive, the fate of the tokenized cow is currently slated for death.

Kelly Crow, The Wall Street Journal

Buddhism

Since 2010, there are an additional 121.6 million Christians on the planet, 346.8 million more Muslims, and 12.6.3 million additional Hindus. Over that time, there are 18.6 million fewer Buddhists. The decline is most pronounced in Asia. China has seen its Buddhist population decline 30 percent over that period, South Korea down 21 percent and Japan down 12 percent. In Japan, for instance, 40 percent of adults who were raised as Buddhists are today religiously unaffiliated. It’s not to say the faith isn’t growing, just that departures exceed converts; for every 12 adults who join Buddhism worldwide, another 22 leave.

Dalia Fahmy, Yunping Tong, Bill Webster and Justine Coleman, Pew Research Center

Influencer

For a minute there, the many influencers who have been paid to live and post from Dubai were getting a bit skittish over the conflict brewing in the region, but a new analysis reveals: don’t worry! Everything is fine among the Dubai influencer crowd; they’re all doing great! An analysis of 129 influencer posts from Dubai in the first days of the conflict found that lots of them contained the exact same and oddly specific buzzwords — “strong leadership,” “stability,” “safety.” And wouldn’t you know it, they were often uploaded within seconds of one another. There is no war in U.A.E.

Ali Breland, The Atlantic

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