Numlock News: March 30, 2026 • Neptune, Wrexham, Arirang

Mar 30, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Hail Mary

In a hold that can truly only be described as immaculate, Project Hail Mary dropped only 32 percent week to week, making $54.5 million domestically in its second weekend and bringing its total domestic cume to $164.3 million. Globally, the movie has made an impressive $300.8 million and is a bona fide hit for Amazon MGM Studios, which has struggled to define itself as a studio. Next week will see competition for Project Hail Mary in the form of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. In general, box office receipts are up 23 percent year over year.

Brent Lang, Variety

Wrexham

Wrexham F.C., the soccer team owned by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny, posted revenues of 33.3 million pounds (US$44.3 million) for the 2024-25 season. The team is enjoying a historic third consecutive year of promotion in English soccer, with revenue up 25 percent year over year and up 28 times over since the 2020-21 season, when the stars bought the team. That said, the team did post a loss of $20.2 million overall because of new players and bonuses from promotion to The Championship. This coming year, Wrexham’s revenue should finish over $60 million.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Arirang

The new BTS album opened its run on the charts with 641,000 equivalent album units, of which 532,000 are album sales. That is the biggest sales week since Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl and the largest sales week for an album by a group since Midnight Memories by One Direction in 2013, which sold 547,000. A big contributor to those sales was the vinyl record, with 208,000 vinyl records sold across 17 variants, the sixth-biggest vinyl sales week for an album in the modern era (the other five are Taylor Swift).

Steven J. Horowitz, Variety

Smart Glasses

China holds a relatively small slice of the global smart glasses market, but thanks to government subsidies and local tech giants going all-in on the product, China is seeing an uptick in adoption of wearables. In 2025, the 2.5 million pairs of smart glasses shipped to the Chinese market made up 16.7 percent of the global shipment of 14.8 million pairs of glasses.

Viola Zhou, Rest of World

CT Scan

A new study argues that the CT scans taken as part of lung cancer screenings contain a significant amount of information about coronary health as well, but that physicians may not even be paying attention to that information. A chest CT produces hundreds of cross-sectional images, and one thing they capture is calcium buildup in the coronary arteries. Dedicated cardiac CT scans measure that buildup precisely. However, a standard lung cancer screening CT can do a pretty solid job of it, too. This is good to know, because there are 19 million noncardiac chest CT scans performed every year picking up information about coronary health that just isn’t being analyzed.

Peter Gunderman, The Conversation

LEDs

Every year, millions of marine animals (including turtles, dolphins, whales and more) are killed as bycatch — captured in fishing nets and drowning as a result. Reducing bycatch is in the interest of everyone, and there have been a number of successful studies on reduction tactics, even as a one-size-fits-all solution remains elusive. Turning our attention to turtles in particular — of which 250,000 die annually as bycatch — attaching green LED lights or UV lights to gillnets has shown promise as a deterrent. One study in Baja California found that lighted nets reduced turtle bycatch by 40 percent, a study in Sechura Bay in Peru found turtle bycatch reduced by 60 percent with LED nets and a study published in Conservation Letters in October 2025 described a study in the Gulf of California where lights reduced turtle bycatch by 63 percent while maintaining the target fish catch rate.

Gennaro Tomma, Knowable Magazine

Neptune

All planets in the solar system have an axial tilt, but Neptune’s tilt is a bit strange, sitting at 28 degrees. A new study published on the arXiv preprint server argues that Triton is the reason why. It is one of Neptune’s moons and one of the weirdest objects in the solar system. Triton is the only large moon in the solar system that orbits its planet backwards in a retrograde orbit against the rotation of Neptune. The moon is believed to have once been a Kuiper Belt object captured by Neptune, and the new paper proposes that Neptune’s tilt is the result of that encounter and the subsequent interaction with a solar system frequency known as s8. Triton seems to be, in the long run, doomed. In about 3.6 billion years, it’ll pass Neptune’s Roche limit, at which point it’ll either collide with Neptune or break apart into a ring system.

Mark Thompson, Universe Today

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