Numlock News: March 17, 2026 • Fireflies, Waterfalls, Subnautica

Mar 17, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Water Falling

Can you put a price on a waterfall? Yeah, totally in fact: Abiqua Falls is a 92-foot vertical drop over a basalt cliff about 50 miles south of Portland, Oregon, that has been privately owned for more than a century. However, its owners — a nonprofit which supports Mount Angel Abbey, a Benedictine monk community — have made it open to the public. The nonprofit listed the property, and a well-heeled buyer swept in: the state of Oregon, where legislators approved $2.1 million to buy it.

Claire Rush, The Associated Press

Fallingwater

Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Fallingwater in the woods of Pennsylvania is nearing completion on a three-year, $7 million project designed to repair the home. After 90 years, it has begun to accumulate a number of engineering flaws. The thing leaked like a sieve because Wright didn’t put enough steel in the cantilevers over the waterfall, which meant that the house began to sag. Wright contended that this was natural, but it was indeed a slow and steady structural failure that, barring significant repairs, could have led to the collapse of the Unesco World Heritage Site. The renovation is slated to conclude in April.

Emma Riva, The Art Newspaper

Cannibals

A new study looked at the tethered release of 2,687 juvenile crabs into the Rhode River in Maryland from 1989 to 2025. It found that for a crab in the Chesapeake Bay estuary, the main thing one needs to worry about is the other crabs. After 24 hours, researchers looked for signs of predation and found that just over 40 percent of the tethered crabs that researchers dropped into the river showed signs of predation. Of those, researchers found that 97 percent of crab killings or injuries were attributable to cannibalism.

Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Scientific American

Vinyl

Sales of vinyl records increased by 7.9 percent in the United States year over year, increasing from 43.4 million units moved in 2024 to 46.8 million units in 2025. That pushed revenue from $954.4 million to $1.043 billion. One thing fueling that growth was the release of Taylor Swift’s Life of a Showgirl, which moved 1.6 million vinyl units alone, and also the corresponding lift in the vinyl sales for the rest of her catalog. Crossing a billion dollars in revenue is impressive. For perspective, overall streaming revenues were $9.5 billion, meaning that physical vinyl of all things is coming in at around nine percent of the entire Recording Industry Association of America’s recorded music revenue picture.

Jem Aswad, Variety

Warehouses

The number of leases signed across the United States for large warehouses picked up last year, with companies signing 146 leases for warehouses that are over 500,000 square feet. That is the highest number of deals since the big warehouse boom ended in 2022, and up 31 percent year over year. The vacancy rate for warehouse real estate — which hit a post-pandemic low of 3.3 percent in the second quarter of 2022 — got as high as 11 percent in the last quarter of 2024, right as a flood of new space hit the market amid a slowdown. Last year’s demand was fueled by third-party logistics companies and manufacturers.

Liz Young, The Wall Street Journal

You Would Not Believe Your Eyes

A new study looked at the synchronization of flashes among fireflies. The research expands on earlier research, which found that once there’s a group of male fireflies larger than 15 insects, only then does the synchronized flashing phenomenon commence, even if a few of the bioluminescent bugs break from the collective occasionally. The new findings are that fireflies were more likely to change their rhythm to align with a dim LED flashing when the LED blinked just before or just after their own blink, indicating that the fireflies synced up by holding or accelerating the tempo of their own flash just slightly.

Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica

Subnautica 2

A federal judge has ordered Krafton, a game publisher, to reinstate a former game studio head who had been fired several years ago. The story around this particular fight is, straightforwardly, bananas. Ted Gill had been the CEO of Unknown Worlds Entertainment, which was acquired by Krafton, and was working on the hotly awaited game Subnautica 2 — a sequel to the hit 2018 game. In May 2025, the financial projections for Subnautica 2 came in, with Krafton projecting sales of 1.67 million copies between its intended release in August 2025 and the end of the year. That would be outstanding news for any studio. However, as part of the acquisition, if Unknown Worlds generated $69.8 million in revenue by the end of 2025, the executives and staff would get $3.12 per additional dollar of sales up to a cap of $250 million. If the game launch proceeded as intended, that would mean a $191.8 million to $242.2 million earn-out. According to the suit, the Krafton CEO consulted ChatGPT about how to avoid paying that, and eventually settled on ceasing all marketing for the game, firing the leadership of Unknown Worlds, and delaying the game’s release past the point where the earn-out would trigger. Now that the dispute made it to court, the judge has found clearly in favor of the sacked team, extending the earn-out period to September 2026.

Jason Schreier, Bloomberg

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