Numlock News: May 26, 2026 • Mercury, Shibumis, Grogu

May 26, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Shibumis

A Shibumi is a trendy form of shade for beaches, particularly in the Carolinas where the company that invented them hails from. The company has sold about 500,000, but countless more knockoffs have been moved. And Shibumis have become so popular that they’re causing issues at beaches, some of which have cracked down on the shades. Though they are easier to set up and arguably safer than umbrellas, critics say they contribute to crowding, are very noisy in the wind and given that they only come in one color, can be monotonous and make it easy for kids to get lost. Several beaches have banned them, though the company has lobbied to keep the $255 product legal.

Fred A. Bernstein, The Wall Street Journal

OSHA

West Virginia does not operate its own OSHA-approved workplace safety program, and so depends on federal inspectors to handle inspections and enforcement. Last year, federal officials handled just 300 inspections across the state, and now there are just six federal OSHA officials overseeing safety for 695,000 workers across 60,000 workplaces in all of West Virginia. That’s down from 10 inspectors as of 2011. It would take the agency 186 years to inspect every workplace in the state once.

Tre Spencer, Mountain State Spotlight

Colbert Bump

“The Late Show” has gone off the air, and with it ends one of the few remaining shows that reliably hosted authors. Stephen Colbert had long hosted literary guests alongside the more traditional Hollywood guests going back to “The Colbert Report,” and enjoyed a reputation in the publishing industry as one of the hosts that actually moved the needle. Between “The Colbert Report” and “The Late Show,” Colbert interviewed about 125 authors in all, which is pretty solid for late night. On network late night, it’s pretty much now just Seth Meyers still featuring authors regularly, at least until someone teaches Jimmy Fallon how to read.

Ed Nawotka, Publishers Weekly

Baby Yoda

“The Mandalorian and Grogu” made $100 million domestically over the long weekend plus another $163 million abroad, which was on-target with expectations. The film tells the iconic story of whatever the focus group said they wanted next out of Star Wars, and featuring iconic characters such as “Hasbro literally made the moulds for these toys a year ago” and “Baby Yoda” and “Can we make a friend for Baby Yoda, the McDonald’s people think that would move some Happy Meals.” It is the first Star Wars movie in seven years. In second place at the box office was “Obsession,” a surprising hit horror movie that managed an unprecedented 39 percent week over week increase in revenue, nigh unheard of, making $23.9 million over the weekend. Made for less than $1 million, “Obsession” has now made $60.7 million domestically and $75 million worldwide.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Banished To The Shadow Realm

Mercury has thick ice deposits at its poles in the shadows shielded from the nearby sun. A new study suggests that all this ice showed up over the course of a single day on Mercury, which, in the interest of full disclosure, is 176 Earth days. New simulations out of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory suggest that a large comet slammed into Mercury about 100 million years ago, vaporizing completely and leaving behind the Hokusai crater. This briefly gave Mercury a water-rich atmosphere, most of which was boiled off by the sun’s radiation, but a fifth of which migrated to the poles where it solidified in the permanently shadowed regions.

Leah Crane, New Scientist

Just One More Kilometer, That Will Do It

Particle physicists in Europe have arrived at their next brilliant plan to advance the field and delve ever deeper into the frontiers of physics: Come on, just one more ring man, that’s all we need to crack the Standard Model, just one more ring it’s just a couple kilometers, come on. The current 27-kilometer Large Hadron Collider, which was used to find the Higgs Boson, just isn’t enough anymore, and after two years of strategizing, CERN has decided on just doing a bigger ring: the Future Circular Collider or FCC, a 91-kilometer long circular collider that would carry out the sophisticated task of accelerating Euros to incredible energies, smashing them and turning them into physics papers.

Adrian Cho, Science

Lithium

A new forecast puts Chinese companies controlling 39 percent of global lithium production by 2030, up from about a third of production as of 2020. Australia, now the largest producer, would see its share of extraction fall from 43 percent in 2020 to 25 percent in 2030, particularly as African supplies of lithium rise from virtually zero percent of global extraction in 2020 to 13 percent in 2030.

Mining.com

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