Numlock News: March 18, 2026 • Firefighter, Books, LED Court

Mar 18, 2026

By Walt Hickey

No Problems Here

At least 73 out of 100 sitting United States senators have a median net worth of over a million dollars, a financial feat that ordinarily applies to just seven percent of the population. There are just 11 senators who (per the median value on their financial disclosures) have a household net worth less than the median of their respective states. Overall, the median net worth of a United States Senator is $4.4 million, about 70 times that of an average household in the country. By comparison, the entire Senate and House of Representatives has between $3.4 million in student debt at the low end and at most $8.3 million across all members.

Taylor Giorno, Notus and Violet Jira, Notus

Asteroid

A fireball over the state of Ohio yesterday appears to be an asteroid that produced a boom loud enough to rattle houses. Based on the preliminary data from NASA, it was probably a seven-ton asteroid that was about six feet in diametertraveling at 40,000 miles per hour before fragmenting over Valley City, Ohio, in an explosion equivalent to detonating 250 tons of TNT. Given that Ohio is uniquely responsible for producing the most astronauts who have walked on the moon, it was only a matter of time before the solar system fought back against the expansionist Ohioan lunar ambitions.

Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Scientific American

Firefighting

The Aspen Fire Protection District is buying five drones produced by Seneca, a startup that is attempting to turn UAVs into potent early wildfire containment assets. Aspen becomes the first wildfire agency in America to employ the aircraft, each of which is designed to carry enough water to produce 50 gallons of foam suppressant. The intention is for the UAVs to serve as an early resource able to smother a remote fire in its early growth while other firefighting teams hike their way to the blaze.

Cyrus Farivar, Ars Technica

Utah

A Utah law has made it possible for a few extreme school districts to ban a book statewide, following legislation that bans a book from all schools in the state in the event that just three school districts ban it. As it stands, the 28th book to be banned under the law — Looking for Alaska by John Green — was just sanctioned, the ninth book banned under the measure this year. While there are 42 school districts in Utah, only nine districts have moved to ban any book. Most of the bans are thanks to the Davis (which was one of the banning districts in 27 of the 28 cases) and Washington (in 26 of the 28 cases) school districts imposing their will on the rest of the state.

Kelly Jensen, Book Riot

Court

Last week, a glass basketball court made a stunning debut at the Big 12 basketball tournament at the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City. It was a marvel produced by ASB GlassFloor, a surface which featured LED panels sealed beneath layers of tempered safety glass coated in ceramic dots that are intended to improve friction. Anyway, players despised it, and some blamed the slick surface for a muscle strain sustained by a Texas Tech star in a quarterfinal loss. So the plug was pulled on the experiment, and the tournament was finished on wood. Well, new data reveals that the NBA’s 50-page engineering study of the glass court didn’t precisely say that it was ready for prime time. The engineering firm Rimkus evaluated the court as safe only for limited use during All-Star Game Weekend events like the skills challenge, not full games. The firm also only examined a playing surface composed of four 6.5-foot by five-foot panels, not a whole court, going so far as to highlight that the surface indeed wore down the shoes tested and potentially reduced traction as a result.

Daniel Libit, Sportico

Model Organisms

A new study analyzed published scientific papers in 48 journals over a 30-year period and found a 68 percent decline in studies that depended on model organisms. Model organisms are creatures often employed in scientific research due to factors like their physiological similarities to human cells or tissues, ease of reproduction and care and well-understood genome and biology. Think classics like the house mouse Mus musculus, iconic nematode C. elegans, baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, zebrafish, thale cress and the superstar fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The cause for the decline in papers featuring model organisms — and whether or not the decline ought to be considered concerning — is not entirely obvious. While the proportion is in decline, the number of papers is actually up, an indication that there are just more papers not involving the species getting prestigious publications. A reduction might even be expected, as successful research reduces the number of interesting questions one might pose about such creatures. After all, model organisms delivered huge insights into genetics in the 1990s and 2000s, and these days they’re potentially more common in specialist journals than in the big, general interest ones.

Mitch Leslie, Science

ISBNs

The total number of books published in 2025 with an ISBN number came in at 4,172,222 books, the vast majority of which (3,529,980) were self-published. On the other hand, 642,242 books were traditionally published, up 6.6 percent year over year. The self-published figure was up 38.7 percent year over year. In the time from 2022 to 2025, the number of traditionally published books is up 10 percent, while the number of self-published books has increased 43.5 percent.

Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly

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