Numlock News: October 14, 2026 • Longshot, Ferret, Cereal

Oct 14, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Fire

Longshot Space Technology is a startup that has raised $20 million to pursue a very old idea about how to get stuff into space: shoot it with a really, really big gun. The intention is to revamp the first stage of a launch vehicle, accomplishing it with a reusable accelerator on the ground. Currently, the company has a 70-foot gun with a six-inch diameter near Barstow in California, but soon it will begin firing from a 140-foot gun with a 30-inch diameter. The company is now preparing to build a 328-foot gun with a 30-inch diameter that might one day be extended to 3,000 feet, which would be capable of launching a 220-pound payload to Mach 8. While the company accomplishes this unique exercise in experimental ballistics, they plan to make money by performing hypersonic testing on behalf of the U.S. military, essentially helping the Pentagon develop hypersonic missile interceptors by shooting test targets at hypersonic speeds that are considerably cheaper on a per-shot basis than actually shooting down a $30 million hypersonic missile.

Tim Fernholz, TechCrunch

SNAP

Despite significant amounts of political attention, confirmed cases of fraud committed by recipients of food stamps are very rare, totaling just 0.08 percent of all benefits issued annually according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or just about $64 million per year. On the other hand, a vastly higher amount of SNAP-related crime is the theft from SNAP recipients through organized fraud rings. In 2025, $470 million was stolen from beneficiaries according to data from the company that provides mobile app services for SNAP recipients, with 990,000 households having benefits stolen. The federal government has stopped tracking rates of that crime and does not attempt to enforce it, and the federal government obviously won’t refund it. Congress could prevent the vast majority of that crime by simply upgrading EBT cards with the digital microchips that are now in most debit and credit cards, which combat the card skimming used by international crime rings to drain these accounts. However, congressional leadership has blocked chip EBT cards nationally; the total cost would be in the range of $215 million to do it.

Eli Hager, ProPublica

Cereal, Killer

While the retail market value of breakfast cereal has risen from $11.5 billion in 2020 to $12.6 billion in 2026, that’s mainly driven by higher prices, as the actual volume of cereal consumed in the United States is down over the period. The total market volume of cereal dropped from 2.2 billion kilograms in 2020 to 1.7 billion kilograms this year, with a projected decline to 1.6 billion kilograms next year. The industry is attempting to adapt to shifting tastes, particularly as younger consumers avoid cereal in its typical breakfast slot and shift to cereal as a snack.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Ferret

According to wildlife managers in Wyoming, no black-footed ferrets have been detected in the Absaroka Range outside of Meeteetse, which is where the species was first revived from feared extinction. Managers surveyed 4,000 to 5,000 acres and found no ferrets, with a drought and a rash of Sylvatic plague ravaging the population and potentially pushing it past the brink. All of the last known wild black-footed ferrets were captured in the Meeteetse area, and in 1987 there were just 18 surviving members of the species in the whole world; the population was slowly revived to 250 animals in 2024, but drought caused that to drop to 70 animals in 2025.

Mike Koshmrl, WyoFile

Canada

In September, Canadian travel to the United States was slightly less down than it was in the same month of 2025, but remains really low compared to 2024 levels as Canadians avoid the U.S. Trips by car were up 5.6 percent and trips by air were up 11.6 percent year over year in September. That is the sixth consecutive month of growth, but the numbers are abysmal compared to before relations between the two countries became tense; car trips in September 2026 were 31.1 percent lower than September 2024, and air trips were down 18.7 percent over the period.

Rashaad Jorden, Skift

Fish

A new study tracked the mentions of different species of fish in 1,192 recipes published in British Good Housekeeping, a magazine, from 1923 to 2025. It found that the specific types of fish included are narrowing down to a few popular types compared to earlier eras when a diverse array of aquatic life was making it onto plates. The five most common species — salmon, tuna, shrimp, haddock and cod — grew from appearing in about 30 percent of recipes in the 1930s to more than 60 percent of recipes from the 1970s onwards.

University of Exeter and Ruth H. Thurstan, People and Nature

Groundwater

New data indicates that there has been an acceleration in groundwater depletion since 2019 in the upper and lower Colorado River basins. In the severe drought that ran from 2020 to 2022, the upper basin lost 17.4 trillion liters of groundwater while the lower basin lost 9.5 trillion liters. That’s particularly concerning because the groundwater of the upper basin was thought to be more resilient than that of the lower basin because it is more readily recharged by snowmelt.

Kelly Izlar, Virginia Tech

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