Numlock News: October 6, 2026 • Binary Star, Bare-Throated Bellbird, Book Ban

Oct 06, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Zombie Campaign

Frank Lautenberg, a senator from New Jersey best known for lending his name to the transit interchange they built in that swamp, has been dead for more than 13 years, but he has lived on in the Lautenberg for Senate campaign committee, which persisted nevertheless — presumably on the off chance they managed to revive the man. It was only this past Sunday that the committee filed its termination paperwork after disposing of $87,000 in cash that had stayed in the account for over a decade, just in case the good people of New Jersey wanted to open a new frontier in gerontocracy. Most of it, $58,000, went to the Lautenberg Foundation, a grantmaking nonprofit. Defunct political campaigns that hold cash have several options to legally dispose of the money — donating it, paying off interminable wind-down expenses or just giving it to the Treasury — but sometimes, the political war chests of the deceased have a way of lingering on in a legally ambiguous afterlife.

Dave Levinthal, The Washington Sun

Default

On Monday, tennis player Daniil Medvedev defaulted from the China Open after hitting a spectator in the stands with a ball hit out of frustration at losing in the semifinal match. Defaulted players forfeit both their ranking points as well as their prize money, which meant that Medvedev is out $220,000 for reaching the semifinals. That is the second-costliest default in pro tennis history, behind Novak Djokovic’s $250,000 loss due to a default in the 2020 U.S. Open. Interestingly, the points loss might hit Medvedev harder financially in the long run; he’s earned 3030 points this year, good for No. 8 in the rankings, and 330 points ahead of No. 9. Losing the 200 ranking points he’d derive from the China Open puts him very close to the bubble for the ATP Finals in November, where the top eight players in the world compete in an event that pays $331,000 just for showing up.

Lev Akabas, Sportico

Birds

A new study published in the journal Evolution looks at the loudest birds in the world, all of which live in Brazil. In 2019, one of the authors measured the white bellbird at 125 decibels, with a voice that sounds like a smoke detector bleating at the sonic intensity of a jackhammer. Enchanting. The new study collected amplitude data on 123 bird species in Brazil and found two other species that broke 120 decibels: the bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema. The study contends that 120 decibels is probably the physical limit for birds.

Barbara Moran, WBUR

Bans

The latest data from PEN showed that there were over 12,000 instances of a book being banned from U.S. school districts in the 2025-26 school year, a record high since PEN had to start tracking book bans in 2021. The vast majority of book bans took place in Texas (8,193 bans) and Florida (3,212 bans), in part because schools in Texas have attempted to comply with SB13 by ham-fistedly asking chatbots which books they should ban.

Sam Spratford, Publishers Weekly

CSI

New studies raise questions about the accuracy and efficacy of various different types of evidence used by forensic experts in criminal investigations. Scientific analysis of ballistics evidence produces considerably higher error rates than one might otherwise accept; in practical testing, examiners misidentified bullets 37 percent of the time. An Australian study found that drugs are not discovered following 75 percent of police dog alerts, and even bloodstain analysis — a staple of CSI shows — doesn’t hold up as strongly under blacklight. One study found that analysts correctly classified bloodstain patterns only 70 percent of the time on rigid surfaces and just 62 percent of the time on fabrics.

Alberta Law Review

Hollywood

A new report from a coalition of Hollywood labor organizations underscores how much of studio film production has left the country. The analysis found that 25 years ago, 74 percent of film production budgets were spent in the United States. That figure has declined sharply, down to 42 percent today. On the television side, that fell from 94 percent to 64 percent over the same period. For the 25 most expensive films, the U.S. market share declined from 74 percent to 34 percent over the 25-year span.

Gene Maddaus, Variety

A Cosmic Mountain Goats Song

A new paper published in Nature Astronomy describes a unique star system, ZTF J0440+2325, residing about 300 light-years from Earth. A red dwarf star and a brown dwarf star are orbiting each other closely, every 86.65 minutes, with the red dwarf slowly consuming the dead husk of the brown dwarf. The system was first thought to be perhaps a black widow binary, where a spinning neutron star is consuming a much smaller companion star, but rather than a system where one object has a significantly larger mass and is clearly the lead partner in the dance, this is a low-mass system with more comparably sized companions. The red dwarf star is 85 times the mass of Jupiter, and the brown dwarf is 25 times the mass of Jupiter.

Jennifer Chu, MIT News

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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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