Numlock News: September 21, 2026 • Guiseppe Garibaldi, Soybeans, Black Lotus

Sep 21, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Black Lotus

A Black Lotus Magic: The Gathering card sold for $2.208 million at Goldin Auctions, a record price for a PSA Gem Mint 10 Alpha-graded Black Lotus card, though still behind the private $3-million sale of a CGC Pristine 10 Alpha Black Lotus in 2024. Rounded edge cut marks on the edge corners may have stymied the bidding on the sale, where the bidders may have differed from the PSA grader’s opinion of the card, which is only one of three such cards known to exist. The real star of the auction was a CGC 9 1998 Pokemon Japanese CoroCoro Comic Promo Holo Illustrator Pikachu, which sold for $2.806 million, triple what a PSA 8.5 version of the card sold for in June.

Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICV2

Resident Evil

Zach Cregger’s reboot of Resident Evil crushed expectations, making $60 million domestically and $48.3 million internationally, well exceeding expectations of a domestic debut in the ballpark of $40 million to $50 million. The reboot came five years after another reboot, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, a commercial and critical failure. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is still trucking along with $6.5 million domestically in its eighth weekend of release, last week surpassing Star Wars: The Force Awakens to notch the best-ever domestic release. Globally, it’s settling in at $2.45 billion, good for the third-best ever release.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Giuseppe Garibaldi

They say the two best days of boat ownership are the day you buy the boat and the day you sell it, so congratulations to both Indonesia and Italy. On Friday, the Giuseppe Garibaldi, a 180-meter-long aircraft carrier, arrived in Jakarta after a four-week voyage from Italy. The Italians are giving the ship to Indonesia for free because, as is common in boat ownership, literally any other option was ruinously expensive. Keeping the retired carrier cost five million euros in 2025, while dismantling it would cost 18.7 million euros. In order to just get the thing working, the Indonesian state news agency has indicated retrofit costs will rise to $900 million. The Navy aims to keep the carrier in service for another 15 to 20 years.

Chandra Asmara, Bloomberg

Brains

A new study published in Nature Neuroscience out of Stanford Medicine presents findings that the brain is in fact two distinct organs that evolved independently over the course of hundreds of millions of years. A real mystery in neuroscience has been researchers’ struggle to generate human hindbrain neurons in the laboratory, which is the region of the brain that controls essential automatic functions like breathing, sleeping, heartbeat and the muscles of the face. That hang-up has made it difficult to research hindbrain diseases such as spinal muscular atrophy and ALS, compared to other diseases that affect the forebrain or midbrain. The researchers discovered that the hindbrain follows a different developmental path during embryonic development, and the reason that attempts to make hindbrain neurons failed was that you can’t make forebrain and midbrain progenitors into hindbrain cells. The researchers found a similar two-origin brain pattern in chickens, zebrafish and even acorn worms; jellyfish, on the other hand, have two separate nervous systems at different ends of the body, and diverged from our ancestors 600 to 700 million years ago. The study argues that evolution resulted in two different neural systems converging spatially into one organ, even if it’s two separate pieces.

Krista Conger, Stanford Medicine

Law Firms

Older partners at law firms are not retiring, which has created logjams at the top of the legal profession and has sent younger ambitious partners jumping ship and getting poached by competitor rival firms promising senior positions. A third of lawyers in the United States are aged 55 or older, and 14 percent are over 65; given the nature of the work, it’s not uncommon to see some lawyers continue to practice into their 80s or 90s.

Erin Mulvaney, The Wall Street Journal

Root Of The Matter

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies identified 346 genes related to carbon storage and root growth, and over the past several years have designed new varieties of soybeans that have roots that dig deeper and penetrate the soil further. It’s a change that means roots may be able to access water under the top layer of soil during droughts, and will also have sequestered more carbon underground after harvesting than the current splayed-root soybeans. The change for steeper roots could also facilitate more crops planted in a smaller area. One hectare of deeper and bigger rooted soybean plants can store an additional metric ton of carbon annually; a gigaton of carbon dioxide can be removed from the atmosphere by 2040 if deeper-rooted soybean, corn, cotton and canola crops are adopted.

Joshua A. Bickel and Annika Hammerschlag, The Associated Press

Ships

The Iran War has been a huge boost to China’s shipbuilding industry, with new shipbuilding orders in the first half of the year totaling 121.06 million metric tons deadweight. That’s 2.7 times higher than the same period a year ago, fueled by a surge in orders for tankers and other large vessels from countries in Asia dependent on Middle East oil; countries that fear a protracted conflict at the Strait of Hormuz would mean longer distances for crude oil from sources elsewhere, with those long distances potentially leading to shortages of ships. China’s global shipbuilding market share has now hit 82 percent, up 14 percentage points year over year; with 363.25 million tons deadweight of incomplete orders for ships, that’s construction work for seven years.

Kohei Fujimura, Nikkei Asia

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 ·