Numlock News: September 11, 2026 • Sugar, Mercury, Lead

Sep 11, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Sugar, We’re Going Down

It was more than they bargained for, yeah, as General Mills, Mars and McKee Foods are suing a group of sugar companies, alleging that they conspired to artificially inflate the price of sucralose, jacking up the price of the sweet stuff to all-time highs by coordinating prices. From 2017 to 2024, the bakeries and confectionaries — McKee makes Little Debbie, if you’ve not heard of them — all purchased billions of dollars worth of sugar from the companies, including from 2022 to 2024, a combined $1 billion worth of sugar from United Sugar, U.S. Sugar, American Crystal and Minn-Dak as well as $200 million worth of sugar from ASR/Domino. They are seeking treble damages. The sugar producers who are defending in the lawsuit control 65 percent of the sugar market, with the sugar business posting $13.5 billion in revenue in 2024 — the very year that they became the target of approximately two dozen antitrust lawsuits.

Sarah Zimmerman, Food Dive

Lead

There are still 1,300 public water systems that have been cited by the EPA for blowing an October 2024 deadline to inventory water lines that might be leaching lead into drinking water. Overall, 6,300 water systems serving 3.8 million people have still not yet submitted the required list. Most of those 6,300 water systems — 84 percent — provide drinking water to 500 or fewer people. There are about four million homes and businesses in the country that are still connected to water utilities by a lead pipe, according to the latest estimates. Ambiguity is also pretty common, with 3,500 water systems not knowing what their service lines are made of, and one in five service lines being made of unknown materials, as lapses in record-keeping continue to pose an issue for utilities.

M.K. Wildeman, The Associated Press

Eggs

Researchers discovered a clutch of titanosaur eggs at an unexpectedly high latitude at a dig site in Argentina, expanding the possible range in which large sauropods might have lived. The 225 eggshell fragments were found in southern Argentina and have been dated to 68 million years old. At the time, that would have been at a latitude of 55 to 60 degrees south, making them both the southernmost definitive evidence of dinosaur eggs and the highest latitude sauropod nesting environment. This is interesting because it means that some of the largest animals that ever lived were sufficiently adaptable to survive at high latitudes, possibly venturing there during warm summers before heading back towards the equator for the winter.

Katie Hunt, CNN Science

MLB

Major League Baseball teams signed 12,700 international rookies from 2012 to 2026, and most of them were from either the Dominican Republic or Venezuela, which were responsible for 84 percent of all signings in 2026. The combination of an enormous payday in the United States has warped the economics of baseball development in the Dominican Republic, and a chance at that kind of opportunity can send families into debt in order to get promising players a shot at the MLB. One issue in particular is early handshake agreements between scouts and families that can make those teenage players targets of moneylenders who persuade undereducated parents to sign away portions of future bonuses in exchange for high-interest loans.

Gus Garcia-Roberts, ProPublica

Mercury

Mercury’s complex surface has wrinkles that indicate the planet was at one point larger than it is today. A new study found that Mercury may have lost 19 kilometers worth of total diameter since the formation of the planet, an estimate that would mean it shrunk by 10 percent to 30 percent more than originally thought. The original estimated shrinkage was a four to 16 kilometer reduction in size, but due to the vast number of impact craters on the planet’s surface, it was tough to get a read on those wrinkles in some areas.

Sasha Warren, American Geophysical Union

Cookies

U.S. cookie sales are projected to hit $18.9 billion in 2026, as growth slows to 1.2 percent amid pressure on discretionary spending, reduction in snacking frequency and naturally the vile and pervasive libel that cookies are “a sometimes food.” One significant impediment for cookies is that there are now simply other snacks, and as customers demand novelty, the cookie has a vast amount of competition. Brands are adapting to that quest for novelty by throwing recipes on the sides of cookie boxes and other snacks, pitching ideas about recipes that the original product might be fashioned into.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Grand Theft Auto

The video game industry is on track for a banner year, with Newzoo’s 2026 estimate for video game revenue coming in at $213.9 billion thanks in major part to the forthcoming release of Grand Theft Auto VI. It’s not just sales of games getting a boost, but also a boost to console sales coming in anticipation of GTA 6, without which console revenue would actually decline. The report flagged that high prices for memory are weighing on gamers this year. That said, researchers also say that the cure for high prices is high prices, and if that doesn’t work, the cure is to release an incredibly popular vehicle-hijacking simulator the same year that truckloads of graphic cards and RAM chips are en route to obvious, irritating warehouses, and something tells me they’ll figure something out.

Isabelle Farina, Variety

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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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