Numlock News: October 29, 2026 • Eels, ED138, Phantom Lighthouse

Oct 29, 2026

By Walt Hickey

The Odyssey

In an exciting moment for nominative determinism, a cruise ship called the Odyssey has encountered a desperate situation stemming from mishaps and mistakes of its pilot, causing terrible problems for those onboard with little hope that it will complete the journey. The 642-foot cruise ship sold passengers on a years-long voyage around the world, with passengers paying Florida-based Villa Vie Residences $100,000 and up for a cabin. Setting sail from Belfast in October 2024, the cruise has since been to 60 countries. Due to spiking fuel costs — reportedly up to $6,000 to $8,000 per cabin — the Odyssey has since been stuck in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, where it forced all 203 passengers to disembark. This essentially abandoned a bunch of affluent retirees in what is literally the central hub of an international scam industry that relentlessly targets them specifically.

Gabriele Steinhauser, The Wall Street Journal

Train

Transnet Freight Rail, a government-run South African railroad company, claims to have sent the longest train ever on a test run. The train was 7.6 kilometers long and composed of 696 freight wagons which were being shipped empty from the Saldanha Bay on the coast inland to the Sishen iron ore mine on a two-day journey. Most freight trains top out at a half mile to 1.5 miles long (.8 to 2.4 kilometers), but South Africa and Australia run far longer trains; the previous record was an Australian train that reached 7.24 kilometers and went from an iron ore mine to a Western Australia port in 2001.

The Associated Press

Atkins

The Atkins brand has been suffering due to the increased adoption of GLP-1s and people reaching diet goals without the same extent of diet control that sustained Atkins for years. Sales are down 20.9 percent over 2026, and with an estimated 55 million Americans — double today’s total, and 15 percent of the population — expected to be on GLP-1s by 2035, the brand is attempting to pivot. The target audience Atkins is looking at is consumers who took GLP-1s, got to their goal, stopped taking the meds and are looking to maintain weight.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Electrolyzer

An electrolyzer is a device that uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, a technology that has been commercialized by primarily European and American scientists. China has set ambitious climate goals that require the development of green hydrogen as well as infrastructure that consumes it. Thanks to state support, China accounts for 70 percent of global electrolyzer manufacturing capacity, and it is producing more machines than the domestic hydrogen market can absorb — a phenomenon that resembles what happened with solar tech.

Katie Brigham, Heatmap

The Light Between The Oceans

Lady Elliot Island is at the southernmost tip of the Great Barrier Reef, and there are precisely two lighthouses on it. One was built in 1873 and decommissioned in 1995, when the second took over lighthouse duties for the island. However, visitors to the island report seeing a third lighthouse, a phenomenon known as a phantom lighthouse illusion, and it’s so common that the island talks about it in the tourism guides. A new study attempted to figure out what’s going on with this illusion by recreating it under VR conditions. It found that when looking outwards to sea with one’s back to the real lighthouse, at a certain distance, it may seem as though the rotating beam of light is coming from out in front of you. Earlier observers reported the illusion happening when they were one to four kilometers from the real lighthouse, but the study found that a distance of just 70 meters should be enough to get the illusion to work.

Simon Cropper and Charles Kemp, The Conversation

ED138

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has spotted what appears to be a newly discovered dwarf planet in our solar system. The object is in an especially bright part of the sky but escaped notice until now. The object is designated ED138, and it’s somewhere between 600 and 1,500 kilometers across. In order to be a dwarf planet and not merely a chunky asteroid, the object must be large enough for its own gravity to make it roughly spherical, and an asteroid with a diameter over 600 kilometers probably should do the trick. ED138 takes 281 years to orbit the sun and does so on a path that is 25 degrees off from the rest of the solar system, which is consistent with an object that had its orbit messed with by mighty Neptune. More observations will be needed to confirm that it is indeed a dwarf planet, but if it is eventually recognized by the International Astronomical Union, it would be the sixth known in our solar system along with Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris.

Leah Crane, New Scientist

Eels

Patience Seamount is a submerged mountain off the coast of Tasmania, and it is absolutely lousy with eels. Every year, it’s the site of a massive gathering of basketwork eels for still unconfirmed reasons, but let’s just say that biologists have a theory about what the eels are up to. A new study published in Royal Society Open Science found that the gatherings contain as many as 2.8 million eels, a biomass of 3,550 metric tons, figures arrived at following nine acoustic surveys of the serpentine saturnalia.

Paul Arnold, Phys.org

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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