Numlock News: September 17, 2026 • Hoppers, Hydrazine, House

Sep 17, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Thank you so, so much to all the folks who have subscribed this week to Numlock! Your paid subscription makes a big difference here. We don’t hit you with any ads and the weekday edition is and always will be free. That’s only possible because lots of readers of choose to pay to subscribe.

There’s perks like the Sunday edition, but ultimately if you like Numlock, subscribing is the best way to support it, and this week is the best week subscribe. Just a day left:

Get 35% off for 1 year

College Football

A new analysis dove deep into estimated roster spending on college football teams in the Power 4 conferences, revealing which schools are and which schools aren’t spending big on their players. The highest-spending schools include Ohio State ($49 million to $54 million), Oregon ($48 million to $54 million) and Texas ($45 million to $55 million), while Boston College had the lowest range ($8 million to $13 million), followed by Duke ($12 million to $15 million). The average team with at least a 50 percent shot at making the playoffs is spending $41 million to $46 million. Diving deeper, the results couldn’t be more clear: All the teams spending more than your team are ruthless pay-to-play mercenaries violating the very spirit of the sport, all the teams spending less than your team are penny-pinching hangers-on who belong in Division I-AA, and your team has managed to deftly balance the unique compensation needs of scholar-athletes in these unique times.

Stewart Mandel, David Ubben and Sam Khan Jr., The Athletic

Lead

When Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it blasted thousands of papyrus scrolls in the library of the Italian city Herculaneum with ash, which turned them into carbonized husks. Lately, there’s been renewed interest in how to read the contents of those scrolls, which cannot be unrolled without damage, and there’s been some success lately with using artificial intelligence analysis of X-ray tomography of the scrolls. A new approach to decoding the scrolls has been published in PLOS ONE by a researcher who took a more direct approach, basically sourcing papyrus, putting it into a high-temperature furnace, and finding that they’re actually much easier to read if the ink contains traces of lead — which absorbs 25 times the X-rays of the surrounding charred papyrus — so researchers should consider looking for ones that contain traces of lead for easier decoding.

Robert Sanders, University of California - Berkeley

T. rex

A new study published in Science Advances used dental material from Tyrannosaurus rex specimens to determine the body temperature of the theropod, finding that T. rex, an egg-laying reptile, nevertheless maintained a body temperature of 36 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit), which is roughly the same as humans. This differs from modern cold-blooded reptiles, which tend to run 28 to 30 degrees Celsius, and is much less than T. rex’s modern nephews, the birds, which stay from 40 to 43 degrees Celsius. The warm-blooded reptile lived in the Cretaceous, which was one of the warmest times in Earth’s history.

University of California, Los Angeles

Turnover

While there is almost certainly more turnover to come, before even the general election in November, there are 74 members of the House of Representatives headed out the door, the most since 1992. As it stands, 42 House Republicans and 32 House Democrats will not be rejoining the chamber at the start of the 120th Congress, the highest level of turnover at this point in the process since the ’92 cycle when 86 members were redrawn into new districts. The House banking scandal then fueled outrage, and even more went on to lose in the general. While there were 33 retirements and 11 representatives who lost their primary, this cycle was a particularly popular one in which to seek other offices, which 28 members chose to do, either reaching for a Senate seat (sought by 16), a gubernatorial office (sought by 10) or something else, even though just 13 made it past their primary.

Drew DeSilver, Pew Research Center

Debt

A new analysis of student loan repayment for 17 million borrowers who began repaying between 2020 and 2025 found roughly 500 schools where at least 40 percent of students aren’t paying back their loans. While elite higher ed tends to get the spotlight, the reality is that of the 500 schools with nonpayment rates of 40 percent or higher, 424 of them are private, for-profit schools, including many cosmetology and barbering schools, technical institutes, private vocational schools and many for-profit universities. Among public schools and private nonprofit colleges, the average nonpayment rate was only 15 percent.

Cory Turner, NPR

Sand Hogs

Sand hoppers are nocturnal crustaceans that live on sandy beaches, and in the aggregate, they’re moving a colossal amount of sand. Each sand hopper digs a new home every night, and researchers analyzing their behavior found that for every meter of coastline, about 21,450 sand hoppers were collectively moving 50 kilograms of sand every night. Across a 25 kilometer stretch of beaches in California, sand hoppers were moving about 310 tons of dry sand per day, which is as much sediment shifting as gets done by some rivers.

American Geophysical Union

Nancy Grace Roman

NASA’s new observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope en route to the L2 Lagrange point beyond the Moon, has enough fuel on board for 22 years of service thanks to extremely accurate and efficient maneuvering during launch, well more than the five years originally planned. The launch was very accurate: The first big burn of the control thrusters consumed 18 kilograms of hydrazine, well under the 200 kilograms allocated to that first burn preflight.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica and Evan Gough, Universe Today

Thank you to Numlock’s paid subscribers, whose support guarantees this stays ad-free. If you pay to subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! Subscribing is the single best way to support a thing you like to read:

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.

Check out my book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, and subscribe to the Numlock Awards newsletter.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Garbage Fire · Fanfic · Young Money · Crumbling Facades · The Adventure Zone · Outdoor Cats · Imported Beer · Auteurs · Overflowing Cups ·