Numlock News: March 3, 2026 • Weerdsluis, Pegasus 3, Sentinel

Mar 03, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Destination Charges

Automakers have figured out a way to sneak in a price hike to cars, with “destination charges” now becoming incredibly common. One would think that the money spent getting a vehicle from the plant production line to the dealership was essentially the core function of the dealership and arguably what the money is for; you would be wrong. A total of $26 billion was spent by car buyers to cover destination charges in 2025. The average destination fee is up from $961 per vehicle in 2015 to $1,551 as of 2025. A Ford F-150’s fee is $2,595 these days, up from $1,695 in 2020.

Ryan Felton, The Wall Street Journal

Weerdsluis

For the sixth year in a row, waterway engineers in the Dutch city of Utrecht are calling upon internet do-gooders to operate the Visdeurbel in a canal lock. The Visdeurbel (“fish doorbell”) is a system where internet users monitor an underwater camera feed and inform operations when migratory fish are trying to get through the canal lock. The operators then lock the canal to facilitate the migration of bleak, catfish, eels and pike. The Weerdsluis dates to the 1600s and is opened when operators manually turn an iron wheel for 30 minutes to an hour. Last year, the site had 2.3 million unique visitors, and the doorbell was triggered 200,000 times.

K.R. Callaway, Scientific American

Hormuz

The Joint Maritime Information Center has declared the regional maritime threat level in the Strait of Hormuz connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean to “critical.” Missile and drone attacks in the Gulf of Oman against commercial vessels have escalated hostilities in the region. Transits through the Strait have fallen to 28 vessels over a 24-hour period, down about 80 percent from the 138 vessels daily average.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

ACLs

ACL injuries are getting more and more common among high school athletes, with the average ACL injury rate increasing 26 percent from 2007 to 2022. Girls have had their knee injury rate sharply increase compared to boys; the ACL tear rate for high school female athletes grew 32 percent over the period, compared to 14.5 percent among the boys.

Marc Levy, The Associated Press

Pegasus 3

Racing comedy Pegasus 3 is continuing its post-Lunar New Year hold on China’s box office, with a $49.5 million weekend bringing its cumulative total to $529.6 million. That said, this looks to be a down year for the Chinese box office through the major holiday, as the $1.41 billion made this year is down 55.9 percent compared to last year, when Ne Zha 2 was well on its way to making $2.2 billion.

Patrick Brzeski, The Hollywood Reporter

Nukes

The LGM-35A Sentinel is an intercontinental ballistic missile that is slated to replace the Minuteman III, which has been in service since 1970. The LGM-35A Sentinel is slated to become operational sometime in the 2030s. Before that happens, though, the Air Force needs to install the 450 hardened underground silos to actually house the missiles. Digging a bunch of holes throughout the Great Plains might not sound like the hardest element of building a network of ICBMs — not exactly rocket science — but it does come with difficulties, given that the military hasn’t constructed a new missile silo since the late 1960s. The entire program is wildly overbudget, rising from $77.7 billion to $141 billion as of two years ago, but the new silos for the Sentinels aren’t even part of that. The new silos will require not only hundreds of holes dug (discreetly!) but also 24 new forward launch centers, three wing command centers, and 5,000 miles of fiber connections.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Drake Equation

The Fermi Paradox is the thought that humans can’t be the only intelligent life out there with so many stars and planets and galaxies in the universe, but given the lack of signal from anywhere else, it sure seems like we are. Two physicists approached the math of this from a new angle, instead arguing that perhaps there’s an upper limit on how long advanced civilizations actually last. Their new paper argues that signals that could have reached us over the past 100,000 years could be from a technologically advanced civilization that survived for no more than 5,000 years. That, or perhaps it takes a technological civilization 5,000 years to learn that it makes a whole lot of survival sense to quiet the heck down.

Mark Thompson, Universe Today

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