Numlock News: September 1, 2026 • Sunken Island, Elm Tree, Humanoid Robots

Sep 01, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Filler Episode

The average quarterly spending on facial fillers in the United States fell to $850 million in 2025, down from $970 million in 2023, as people looking to get a little vitality in their face are dialing back the dosage. Global revenue for Juvéderm was down 15 percent year over year last year amid what those in the industry call “filler fatigue.” While people are cutting back on the standard hyaluronic acid dermal fillers, that doesn’t mean they’re finished with getting work done; much to the contrary, spending on facial surgeries, which includes nose jobs and facelifts, hit $1.8 billion in the first half of 2026, up 22 percent year over year.

Chavie Lieber and Sara Ashley O’Brien, The Wall Street Journal

Hair of the Dog

Scientists with the United States Forest Service injected 6,000 young elm trees with Dutch elm disease spores in an attempt to test resistance to the illness that has killed tens of millions of elm trees across the country. The infected trees will be taken care of in an orchard for the next 15 years, at which point their seeds will form the vanguard of an effort to replenish the population of elms in the country. Those young elm trees were bred from a group of trees in the Northeast that have survived the plague. Elm trees are ecologically significant; they tolerate flooding well, can survive frigid northern winters and help prevent flooding by sucking up water after heavy rains.

Amanda Swinhart and Patrick Whittle, The Associated Press

Screens

New data from market researcher JD Power from a survey of 68,084 owners of new 2026 model vehicles found that the tech features in cars that scored the best were the ones that didn’t demand the attention and focus of the drivers. Smart ignition and smart HVAC systems were the most popular and had the highest satisfaction rates, with smart ignition registering only 2.4 problems per 100 vehicles. On the other hand, things like passenger screens — large screens in front of passengers — were useless, with a third of owners using them in the first 90 days of ownership, and just six percent using them every time they drive.

Andrew J. Hawkins, The Verge

Library

Some libraries have experimented with ditching the rigid, and at times antiquated, organizational principles of the Dewey Decimal System in favor of taking a page out of retailers’ playbooks and organizing their shelves as one would a bookstore. Deschutes County, Oregon recently overhauled its library system and experimented with shifting up the organizational structure of its stacks in a pilot program to significant success. It started in 2017, when librarians reclassified the children’s picture books, moving from alphabetizing by author name and toward topic-based classification, a move that increased circulation by 20 percent. When they reorganized the law library, they notched a 10 percent jump in circulation. After those successful pilots, the library rolled out the initiative system-wide to great effect: The average circulation checked out at any given time jumped from a Dewey average of 20 percent to almost 30 percent, with the circulation for adult nonfiction benefiting the most, rising from 15 percent to 27 percent thanks to the change.

Patrick Sisson, Fast Company

Alfalfa

The federal plan for the lower Colorado River basin will demand a 1.25 million acre-feet cut in water usage annually by 2028. For Arizona, their cut is enough to serve 2.3 million households per year. For others, it is enough for some grass. Most of the Colorado River is used to grow food for cows in one way or another: In the upper Colorado basin, 70 percent of the water goes to alfalfa and other hay, and that’s 41 percent in the lower Colorado. Lots of that alfalfa goes to cows that are overseas, with 26 percent of the hay grown in California and Arizona being exported. When Arizona’s Colorado River allocation was cut by 300,000 acre-feet in 2022, lots of farmers with junior rights stopped planting or switched from water-intensive alfalfa (which fell 48 percent in one irrigation district) to barley (which grew 159 percent).

Mark Gongloff, Bloomberg

Robots

Last year the humanoid robot industry moved 20,000 units, with China responsible for 95 percent of that movement. This year, China anticipates producing 100,000 humanoid robots, and Bank of America projects that annual shipments will hit 1.2 million annually by 2030. China is home to 150 humanoid robot companies, and the government supported those companies by buying $230 million worth of them in the first half of this year, up from $62 million in the same period of last year and $6 million in H1 2024. Power utility State Grid announced plans to spend $1 billion on robots, saying that each unit will save $74,000 to $119,000 in labor costs.

Laurie Chen, Eduardo Baptista and Ju-min Park, Reuters

Forbidden Island, Maximum Difficulty

A verdant, tree-covered island appeared mysteriously in the largest reservoir in British Columbia, only to disappear shortly after it was spotted. B.C. Hydro and local residents spotted the forested landmass in Williston Reservoir with satellite imagery on July 21, confirming the new island in the reservoir — an islet that was about 70 meters wide, 140 meters long and 9,800 square meters in area. By August 5, the island was no longer visible and appears to have disappeared. The Williston reservoir was created in 1968 and is the seventh-largest reservoir in the world, and it is filled to the brim for the first time in 14 years; authorities say that the high water may have been a driftwood accumulation that formed over many years, allowing trees to take root in the debris that broke free as water levels rose. That said, any residents of British Columbia who may have recently entered into a desperate pact with the fae are urged to consult their contracts to ensure they have not failed their part of the bargain.

Matt Prepost, CBC 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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