Numlock News: March 23, 2026 • Project Hail Mary, Arctic Metagaz, Kingpins

Mar 23, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Amaze Amaze Amaze

Project Hail Mary made $80.6 million at the domestic box office this weekend. Coupled with $60.4 million overseas, that makes the film a banner opening for the Amazon MGM Studios adaptation of the Andy Weir book. The box office sales smashed expectations, which were originally around $50 million domestically. It is one of only three non-franchise non-sequel movies to open to $60 million or more this decade, after Oppenheimer and Us.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Abandon Ship

The Russian liquid natural gas carrier Arctic Metagaz has been drifting in the central Mediterranean for the past three weeks following an explosion that took place on the vessel 170 nautical miles off the coast of Malta. The Russians are blaming it on a drone strike from Ukraine, though that’s unconfirmed. The ghost ship has now drifted into Libya’s search-and-rescue region and is 53 nautical miles north of Tripoli. In response, the state oil company of Libya has hired a specialist salvage company to intercept what might be a floating environmental catastrophe if the unstable vessel were to land. Two of its four LNG tanks are believed to still be intact, though gas may be dispersing too. Italian officials estimate that it could reach the Libyan coast in four to six days.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Wagon Wheel

A new study published in Antiquity describes a cache of 950 objects found across two separate hoards in North Yorkshire in the United Kingdom, dating to the Late Iron Age, near what would have been a regional power center. The cache — which the researchers believe was originally 300 whole objects that broke apart, most of which were vehicular in nature — is changing timelines around technological developments. This is due to the discovery of kingpins in the cache, or what appears to be kingpins. A kingpin is a part of the steering mechanism of four-wheeled wagons that does not appear on chariots or two-wheeled carts. The contents of the hoard seem to belong to at least seven wagons, and are dated to the late 1st century BC to the early 1st century AD.

Krystal Kasal, Phys.org

Solar

Virginia appears poised to follow Utah and become the second state in the country to approve plug-in solar, which are convenient panels that plug directly into a home’s electrical system through a standard wall plug and can significantly reduce energy bills. The format is a hit in Germany, where renters realized they could save a couple of bucks a month by just hanging a solar panel on their balcony railing, and 1.2 million systems entered service. Utilities, blindsided by the new popularity and a suite of local legislation, are trying to stop the bills in state capitals. The companies argue that they’re not just opposed to the panels on the basis of lost business but rather that it’s a safety issue. That said, the German utilities tried to raise the same stink, but there have been zero safety incidents reported in Germany aside from cases of tampering with the panels, despite widespread use.

Jeff Brady, NPR

Woof

People are spending more money on veterinarian visits, and lo and behold, people are going to the vet less. Pet care costs were up 5.1 percent in February year over year, more than double the rate of overall inflation. Meanwhile, total vet visits were down three percent in the fourth quarter of last year, notching the 16th straight quarter of declines.

Emily Forgash and Rachel Phua, Bloomberg

Over The Limit

Intoxalock sells breathalyzer devices that can interface with vehicle ignition switches. When someone gets one or more DUI charges, oftentimes one of the means of recourse is adding that kind of system to their car in order to keep their license. The company says it provides services to 150,000 drivers annually. Well, on March 14, Intoxalock was hit with a cyberattack and had to pause some of its systems as a precaution. This was a problem for people with Intoxalock systems in their cars who needed a routine calibration, essentially locking people out of their cars. There is no timeline for recovery.

Zack Whittaker, Tech Crunch

Territory

At the start of February, SpaceX rolled out a system that the Ukrainian government had asked them to implement for years: blacklisting all Starlink internet systems in the front lines of the Russian-Ukrainian war that were not on a whitelist of approved Ukrainian systems. Russia is not supposed to have access to Starlink, but has obtained the internet terminals nevertheless. It has been a contributing cause to the bloody stalemate at the front. Since cutting off the systems, Ukraine has been able to reclaim its territory at a swift and encouraging clip. It has retaken 150 square miles of territory in southern Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions, where Russian forces had previously been on the march. Thanks in part to Russian Starlinks finally going offline, February was the first month since 2023 in which Ukraine regained more territory than it lost.

Nikita Nikolaienko, Ian Lovett, and Daria Matviichuk, The Wall Street Journal

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