Numlock News: March 25, 2026 • Antimatter, Cougar, Northwest Passage
By Walt Hickey
Steal A Brainrot
Released in May 2025, “Steal a Brainrot” is a game made in Roblox that has grossed something like $64 million thanks to in-game purchases. A wave of knockoff versions of the game has hit the platform, and since November, the developers of “Steal a Brainrot” have filed at least four lawsuits trying to take them down. Titles like “Cut Grass for Brainrots” and “Survive LAVA for Brainrots” have since emerged. Games like “Grow a Beanstalk for Brainrots” go so far as to pull from not only “Steal a Brainrot” but also “Grow a Garden,” another Roblox hit. There’s real money in Roblox games: last year, the platform paid out $1.5 billion to game creators.
Cecilia D’Anastasio, Bloomberg
Antimatter
Researchers at CERN pulled off an impressive demonstration: the first attempt at putting antimatter on the road. Right now, it’s understandably difficult to transport antimatter given that all the things used in driving are stubbornly made out of matter. So, if you want to study the stuff, you’ve got to go to the place where it was made. That tends to be CERN’s Antimatter Decelerator hall, which produces antiprotons for experiments. The Symmetry Tests in Experiments with Portable Antiprotons (STEP) project began in 2018, attempting to make a portable container capable of moving the antiprotons around, using liquid helium and magnetic fields. A test run driving 92 antiprotons on a four-kilometer loop on the CERN campus was a success, a great sign for antiproton research at more magnetically quiet facilities in Europe.
Ah, For Just One Time
Energy company Atco announced it is investing C$10 million (US$7.2 million) in a 40 percent stake of West Kitikmeot Resources, advocating for the Grays Bay Road and Port Project in the Canadian province of Nunavut. Located in Canada’s far north, the province is not actually connected to the rest of Canada by road and is accessible only by barge and aircraft. The project would build a deepwater port in the Arctic Ocean, as well as an airstrip and a 230-kilometer road running through Nunavut and into the Northwest Territories. The financial angle is mineral resources that are currently inaccessible; the road would connect zinc and copper deposits (as well as other mineral resources) to the port in Grays Bay in the Northwest Passage. This, as part of a proposed 400-kilometer Arctic Economic and Security Corridor linking the Northwest Territories to the Grays Bay Road and Port, would connect Nunavut to the rest of the Canadian highway system. It will cost at least C$2 billion, with construction starting as soon as 2028 and opening by 2035.
Reading
A new study of the reading habits of Danish schoolchildren found that once school lets out — be it for the holidays or (in this study) for Covid-19-related lockdowns — boys stop reading, while girls tend to keep it up. The study looked at a database of library loans for 200,431 students in Years three to five, as well as data from the reading app BookBites for 24,539 students in 15 municipalities. The data was unambiguous: boys tend to lose ground when schools close and appear to benefit from the structure offered by school. Denmark has long struggled with how to handle boys who are on school break; In a somewhat memorable incident, a listless young Danish man returning from university suffered from a lack of structure so severe that it led to the destruction of the royal family, a Norwegian prince taking the throne and even the demise of his chums Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, all while his girlfriend considered a perfectly reasonable career in a convent.
Carsten Munk Hansen, University of Copenhagen
TSA
The TSA is not being paid right now because of a lapse in funding for the Department of Homeland Security as part of a broader fight over funding for ICE. Call-out rates are soaring for airport security at major U.S. airports, with Houston seeing a call-out rate of 40.3 percent at William B. Hobby Airport and 36.1 percent at George Bush Airport. Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson hit 37.4 percent, New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong Airport hit 34.9 percent and New York’s JFK hit 33.7 percent. This is leading to long lines and irritation for travelers, which the federal government is attempting to solve by sending in ICE to look menacing and not help in any way whatsoever, which will certainly solve this.
Dina Katgara, Jim Wyss, Catarina Saraiva and Maya Davis, Bloomberg
La Colombe
Chobani is expanding the production facility that makes the ready-to-drink La Colombe Coffee, which has been a real hit for the yogurt company. La Colombe’s ready-to-drink business grew 32 percent year over year. The ready-to-drink coffee business in general is expected to grow by 4.8 percent this year, reaching $8.31 billion, and is expected to reach $11 billion by 2031.
Christopher Doering, Food Dive
Mountain Lions
The government of Utah used to cap the number of mountain lions a person could hunt to one per year, but it recently removed that limit and began to encourage hunters to kill the predators. Indeed, the cougar population has been in decline in Utah since 2016; the population fell from 1,900 mountain lions to just 1,100 in 2024. From October of last year to March this year, hunters have killed 45 mountain lions in the state under the new policy. The state claims that it is attempting to boost populations of the cougars’ prey, but critics argue that there isn’t a scientific basis for the culling. They argue that the mule deer in question are in decline owing to habitat loss, not overpredation. This is the worst news for the future prospects of Utah’s cougars since The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives went on hold.
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1) Picky point by an expatriate Canadian: Nunavut is a territory of Canada, not a province.
2) The story about cougars once again proves my point that we humans suck as stewards of the planet.
On the TSA, Reason gets it.
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/03/23/its-time-to-abolish-the-tsa/
(And New Orleans gets special scorn. It shouldn’t take four people to get the guy in the wheelchair scanned. Look, guy, I’m not going to run anywhere. But at least after it was over, I could cover myself accidentally with powdered sugar from the Cafe du Monde beignets….)