Numlock News: March 6, 2026 • Electrons, Neutrinos, Four Lokos

Mar 06, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Phusion

Hey Sharks, thanks for hearing my pitch. Two iconic brands, coming together. One of them is a daily morning newsletter about fascinating numbers buried in the news called Numlock. The other one is a legendary and, dare I say, iconic beverage brand that both excites and relaxes — full of a substantial volume of liquor and stimulants while containing absolutely nothing of nutritional value. This merger, for which I require only $400 million, brings together two icons: the newsletter and, of course, the beverage that resulted in the newsletter’s writer one time getting so drunk he could not remember the outcome of Super Bowl XLV the following morning after chipping a tooth at his friend Kevin’s house. I, of course, refer to Four Loko, the beverage that was reformulated to a 24-ounce tallboy with 150 milligrams of caffeine and 14 percent ABV in 2008, delighting and scaring a generation. It is now owned by Phusion Projects and is being explored for sale to a lucky buyer for about $400 million. With your investment, that buyer could be me — a guy who actually thought that the Black Eyed Peas had an orderly and well-choreographed halftime show performance after drinking enough Four Loko, that’s what this liquid can do to a person.

Olivia White, VinePair

Marsupials

The pygmy long-fingered possum (Dactylonax kambuayai) lived 300,000 years ago in what is now Queensland, Australia, only to vanish during the ice age. We can now only find it as fossils after last being known to exist in West Papua, Indonesia, about 6,000 years ago. Similarly, the ring-tailed glider (Tous ayamaruensis) was pieced together from fossil fragments in West Papua found in the last century. Anyway, someone found the two species, still living, the first new genus of New Guinean marsupial described since 1937. There have been reports of populations of both still living in lowland mountain forests in the Bird’s Head peninsula in the Indonesian-controlled portion of New Guinea.

Adam Morton, The Guardian

Gol D. Roger

The manga franchise One Piece notched 600 million copies sold. To commemorate the milestone series, creator Eiichiro Oda wrote a core secret of the franchise — the nature of the eponymous One Piece treasure — on a piece of paper, sealed it in a container, and dropped it 651 meters to the floor of the Japanese sea. Well, the internet then struck, and figured out that the container is located in an area of Sagami Bay, just south of Kanagawa Prefecture. Within two days, streamers with large audiences and the kind of money to do something daring in the ocean (such as IShowSpeed) are already making plans to try to find the treasure.

Francesco Cacciatore, Polygon

Analysis

A new study found that when there is CEO turnover at a public company, the resulting uncertainty requires so much new attention from Wall Street analysts that they neglect the other companies in their portfolio. This leads to less-accurate forecasts for other firms these analysts cover. Overall, the study — which analyzed 876,385 forecasts — found that when analysts have to rebuild relationships with the affected company’s leadership, their forecasts get 1.15 percent less accurate, which is about equivalent to the analyst losing four years of general forecasting experience.

Nina Collavo, Cornell University

VistaVision

In the 1950s, the VistaVision large-scale film format emerged, and cinematographers applied it to films like Vertigo and The Ten Commandments, only to go dormant in the early 1960s when other film formats appeared. Though some uses of VistaVision still emerged — the visual effects of some obscure footnote of a movie called Star Wars were shot on VistaVision — the equipment languished in storage, only for a recent revival to crack those cameras out of the museum and into the field. Last year’s The Brutalist won best cinematography in no small part because a portion of the film was shot on the format. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another was shot about 80 percent in VistaVision because the director wanted it to feel like The French Connection, as was fellow nominee Bugonia.

Jake Coyle, The Associated Press

Charged Up

Though electric vehicle sales are in a slump after the removal of federal incentives, it’s been getting easier for the 5.8 million EVs on the road to find chargers. Networks are expanding, getting more reliable and even faster. Charging networks added 11,300 ultra-fast cords last year, up 48 percent over 2024. One out of every four new chargers installed in the last quarter of 2025 were the kind that can pump at 250 kilowatts or more, which would add 100 miles of range in under 10 minutes. Chargers are bust 16 percent of the time, and in some states, utilization is coming up on 25 percent.

Kyle Stock, Bloomberg

Neutrinos

A number of large and expensive instruments are all trying to find the mass of the neutrino, a subatomic particle that comes in three flavors and has beguiled scientists for years owing to its mysterious nature and the difficulty of study. The Standard Model says neutrinos have no mass, but observations have revealed that they actually do. In order to adjust the Standard Model accordingly, you’ve got to nail that mass down. The year 2030 is being floated as a viable year to figure out the order of neutrino masses. The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment (KATRIN) is the sole experiment trying to pin down the absolute masses. Based on the data collected from 2019 to 2022, the researchers contend that the average neutrino weighs less than 0.8 electron volts. Based on 2025 data, researchers know that the mass is less than 0.45eV. It’s entirely possible that the mass is lower than 0.1eV, which would be an issue; if neutrinos are lighter than 0.3eV, KATRIN won’t be able to measure it. What comes next — whether PROJECT 8, one proposed approach, or KATRIN++, another — is still an open question.

Nicola Jones, Knowable Magazine

This week in the Sunday edition I spoke to the brilliant Eben Novy-Williams of Sportico, who also writes the great newsletter Club Sportico. We spoke about the baseball team moving the walls of its stadium for advantage, the latest innovations in jersey advertisements, why the incentives have shifted for players to stay in college and what obscure sport’s time has come. Eben can be found at Sportico, at their fun newsletter Club Sportico, and on the Sporticast.

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

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