Numlock News: September 10, 2026 • Epishelf Bittersweet, Gondwana

Sep 10, 2026

By Walt Hickey

WPBL

Revenue for professional women’s sports is projected to hit $3 billion this year, up 340 percent in four years, thanks in large part to growth in established leagues like the WNBA and the National Women’s Soccer League. Upstart leagues are attempting to get in on the surge in interest as well, with the Women’s Professional Baseball League kicking off its first season back in August and the playoffs kicking off last night. The WPBL draws from a particularly international set of players. Because baseball in the United States is not an NCAA-sanctioned sport, nearly half of the 65 players in the league hail from abroad, with 11 from Canada, eight from Japan, five from Mexico and four from Australia. The salary cap for each team is just $95,000 over the eight-week season.

Callie Maddox, The Conversation

Window

The age of permissive return policies has quietly ended, as companies tighten up their protocols around what they will accept as a return, when they will accept it and in what manner they’ll compensate the customer. Right now 68 percent of retailers are charging a fee on returns at least some of the time, up from 43 percent of retailers five years ago. Return windows are getting shorter, dropping from 39 days to 37 days on average over the past two years, and at larger brands, dropping from 43 days to 38 days. Returns are tough for retailers — processing returns costs, on average, 27 percent of the purchase price — and the margins aren’t there to keep up with the overly generous policies.

Esther Fung, The Wall Street Journal

Epishelf

A new study confirms fears that the last epishelf lake in Canada has indeed permanently drained and cannot recover, signaling the permanent loss of a millennia-old ecosystem. An epishelf lake forms when an ice shelf dams a layer of freshwater above seawater connected to the ocean, and the Milne Fiord epishelf lake on northern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut was a textbook example. In July 2020, the ice shelf broke apart, losing 45 percent of the area and destroying the barrier holding the ice water in place, causing the lake to vanish by that autumn. By July 2022, brackish water had fully replaced the freshwater, and there has been no recovery since, meaning that a system that took millennia to form was wiped out in a matter of months.

Lou Corpuz-Bosshart, University of British Columbia

Bittersweet

A new analysis of 7,384 films sought to track the evolution of endings, finding that the percentage of movies with happy endings has declined from 56 percent in the 1990s to 48 percent today. That’s not to say that unhappy endings have come to corner the market — unhappy endings went from 12 percent of film endings in the 1990s to 17 percent in the 2000s, only to drop right back down again to 13 percent of conclusions in the 2020s — but rather the very steady rise of movies that end bittersweet. Those have increased steadily from 26 percent of movies in the 1980s to 35 percent of films in the 2020s.

Stephen Follows, StephenFollows.com

Gondwana

Gondwana, the continent that would eventually form into the supercontinent Pangea during the time of the dinosaurs, is getting upgraded to a supercontinent itself in a new study that claims that it encompassed 80 percent of all Earth’s land 550 million years ago. This also calls into question the theory that supercontinents emerge periodically every 500 million years, with the established timeline putting the Nuna supercontinent 1.8 billion years ago, Rodinia 1.2 billion years ago and Pangea 335 million years ago. “Supercontinent” is the somewhat arbitrary line where a continent encompasses 75 percent of all continental crust; Gondwana was previously believed to have just 64 percent of known land.

Paul Voosen, Science

Batteries

Battery installations in the United States hit 20.2 gigawatts in the second quarter of 2026, which puts the U.S. on pace for 71 gigawatt-hours of batteries installed this full year, 20 percent more than last year. Of those, 60.75 gigawatt-hours will be utility-scale, and 10.05 gigawatt-hours will be behind-the-meter, the latter category encompassing the kinds of batteries owned by homeowners and businesses, but this year in particular refers to those powering data centers. Indeed, home installations are down 16 percent in 2026 due to the killing of a tax credit.

Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review

Airbus

Airbus has over a 50 percent market share in China, with the country’s roughly 30 airlines flying 2,370 Airbus jets. It’s facing stiff competition, though, and has cut its forecasted number of narrowbody jets sold to Chinese airlines down by 500 units to 7,480 jets over the next 20 years, and 8,830 planes overall in general. The rival consuming its market share? No, not Boeing, but high-speed rail, with China aiming for 70,000 kilometers of high-speed rail by 2035, up from 50,000 kilometers today, with the rail system serving as a serious and viable alternative to jets.

Danny Lee, Bloomberg

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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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