Numlock News: March 13, 2026 • Ravens, Opera, Ants
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend! Check out the Numlock Awards season spinoff blog to catch up ahead of the Oscars!
Steam
One of the primary ways that independent games are distributed is through Valve’s Steam store, so the health of the storefront is a decent proxy for the health of the indie game industry. Valve revealed earlier this week that 5,863 games earned over $100,000 through the storefront last year, up 30 percent over the past five years. The company used the stat to argue against the criticism that with 19,000 new releases, game visibility is a real, serious problem and that indie devs attempting to release a game face dire odds. That said, there are reasons to believe that those figures may be a tad optimistic. First, those 6,000-odd games could very well include older titles and not simply games released that year. And moreover, after factoring in the take for Steam and the take for the taxman, that $100,000 gross sure looks like $50,000 net for developers pretty quick.
Holztrompete
The opera Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner requires the use of a four-foot wooden instrument called a holztrompete, but many productions make do with a more typical horn. What is a holztrompete, you ask? Well, it was invented by, you guessed it, Richard Wagner, to nail the specific sound he was going for in the moment that a ship carries the eponymous Isolde to Brittany, where the eponymous (and mortally wounded) Tristan is waiting. A classic move within the entertainment business — any producer knows the real money’s in merchandising anyway — a 46.5-inch version of the holztrompete specially constructed to fit the (pretty ambiguous) specifications is now featuring in the new production that opened Monday at the Metropolitan Opera.
Ronald Blum, The Associated Press
Ant Man
Authorities in Kenya arrested a man bound for China at a security check at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi after they found an enormous number of ants smuggled in his luggage. Within his personal luggage, authorities found 1,948 garden ants packed in test tubes, along with another 300 live ants concealed in rolls of tissue paper in the luggage. The ants were queens, which are in high demand as the species, Messor cephalotes, is kept as a pet. Investigators are linking the man to a case from last year where four suspects pleaded guilty to smuggling thousands of live African harvester ant queens out of the country. Authorities are going so far as to allege that this man was the ringleader and only escaped last year by using a different passport.
Raven
In what researchers are describing as one of the most metal discoveries in recent memory, a new study found that when wolves kill, ravens remember. It has been known for some time that ravens tend to be found in the same location as wolves, where the birds may scavenge the kills of the pack. Generally, it was thought that the ravens just followed the wolves around, but the reality is even cooler. The study tracked the movements of 69 ravens and 20 wolves around Yellowstone, and monitored their locations as transmitted by GPS over the course of the winter — the season ravens tend to interact and associate the most with wolves. It found that rather than tracking wolves, the ravens instead would revisit areas where wolf kills were common: flat valley bottoms, for instance, are sites where wolves tend to be more successful in the hunt. This behavior — relying on memory rather than wasting energy tracking a wolfpack below — also allows the birds to scavenge the kills of multiple packs and wolves, rather than just one.
Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
Helium
The war in Iran and the subsequent effective closing of the Strait of Hormuz are having widespread reverberations, particularly among commodities that depend on the natural gas plants of Qatar. The country was responsible for 33 percent of global helium production last year — the noble gas is a byproduct of natural gas extraction. Two of the three helium plants in the country are tied directly to liquid natural gas production, production which has ground to a halt. Demand for helium surged 14.6 percent in 2025 and is projected to grow 6.3 percent in the years to come. It’s an important element in semiconductor manufacturing, which surpassed MRI machines as the biggest consumer of helium last year. Annual demand is six billion cubic feet per year. While other producers are likely to make up for the loss, it’s still going to cost them.
Chris Stokel-Walker, Sherwood News
Aquariums
Saltwater aquariums are becoming a popular hobby among those with the finances to maintain them, and they’re not cheap. Maintenance costs — which involve scuba divers to manage tanks of sufficient size — can cost thousands per month. According to the American Pet Products Association Fish & Reptile Report, 43 percent of saltwater fish owners opt for custom tanks, and 34 percent of them possess tanks larger than 126 gallons.
Robyn A. Friedman, The Wall Street Journal
Pyrophilous
When a forest burns, it leaves a lot of soot and charcoal, which, chemically speaking, is pyrolyzed organic material. That’s usable carbon, but in a form that’s hard to use for organisms; all the ringed molecules are fused together in clumps, and microbes normally can’t eat that, especially given the large amounts of toxic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. So, how do forests recover after burns? Pyrophilous fungi thrive in the soil, turning that carbon into more bioavailable forms. In general, the fire fungi are not especially well-understood. However, given the possible five million species of fungi living on the planet, it has become an intriguing avenue of research.
This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Krista Langlois, an editor at BioGraphic who worked on the four-part feature series Conservation Enters a New Era. These four stories were incisive, well-written explorations into one of the most important ramifications of the slashed USAID funding, specifically that efforts to fund conservation — ordinarily a bipartisan goal — were gutted unilaterally. The package contains four great stories all of which are worth checking out:
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The conservation work that USAID was doing could probably be done by standalone bills if it’s really important. But the Democrats’ Pay-As-You-Go rules basically make passing something that’s not tucked into a larger appropriation basically impossible. There hasn’t been a budget passed in regular order since 2013. And the Federal Debt has tripled since W. left in 2009.