Numlock News: September 23, 2026 • Cuttlefish, Incendiamoeba, Westinghouse

Sep 23, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Fire Amoeba

Researchers looking for life in the scorching-hot geothermal pools of Lassen Volcanic National Park in California have found a fascinating creature they’re calling Incendiamoeba cascadensis, or “fire amoeba of the Cascades,” which was found in a lake that maintains a temperature of 47 degrees Celsius, or 116 degrees Fahrenheit. In subsequent lab studies, the organism continued to grow even at temperatures of 57 degrees Celsius and continued to reproduce up to 63 degrees Celsius, which are new records for eukaryotes. The study, published in Cell, contends that the amoeba may even be able to tolerate temperatures up to 70 degrees Celsius by morphing into a cyst. Changing form? Extreme, magma-fueled environment? They named it “Incendiamoeba”? My fellow Americans, we’ve done it, we’ve discovered a fire-type Pokémon.

Taylor Mitchell Brown, Science

Polo

Hurricane Polo in the Pacific has undergone a nearly unprecedented intensification thanks to hot El Niño water fueling the storm. What was a 45 to 50 mile per hour tropical storm as of early Monday became a 160 mph Category 5 hurricane on Tuesday morning; that intensity change, strengthening 110 miles per hour over a 24-hour period, was matched only once in the eastern Pacific according to records dating back to the 1970s, when Hurricane Patricia did it in 2015. Polo is the third Category 5 hurricane this season in the eastern Pacific, tying the record-setting 2018, 2002 and 1994 seasons.

Michael R. Lowry, Eye on the Tropics

Dams

Dam removals have been giving thousands of miles of rivers back to the creatures that once called them home; since 1912, over 2,300 dams have been removed from U.S. waterways, peaking at 108 dam removals in 2024 when 4,000 kilometers of waterways were reconnected. While much of the attention has been on salmon populations in the American West, lots of the action has been in the eastern United States where 1,100 demolitions have unblocked 32,000 kilometers of river. There’s still lots more to go — the 1800s were a boom time for mill-building, with 65,000 of them stopping up waterways, and still eastern fish runs remain blocked by at least 35,000 dams — but the effect of removing a dam can be remarkable. Within 12 years of demolishing two dams on Maine’s Penobscot River, six million river herring returned, double the figure of two years before.

Ben Goldfarb, bioGraphic

Satellite

Electronics manufacturer Sharp announced plans to develop an antenna capable of connecting to multiple satellite networks, pushing it into a space that had been dominated by proprietary equipment like SpaceX’s Starlink, and potentially offering consumer choice and ease of switching. The move is strategic in part because the company, which is from Japan, believes that there will be a large slice of the satellite internet market that doesn’t necessarily want to rely on either an American or Chinese option. The satellite communications market is projected to double by 2033 to $223 billion.

Kyoko Hariya, Nikkei Asia

Smoking

In 1987, a smoker had a 3.4 percent chance of dying within five years, and as of 2023, a smoker had a 4.9 percent chance of dying within five years. This seemingly paradoxical result, demonstrated by data from the 1987 to 2013 waves of the National Health Interview Survey, presented not because it’s any more dangerous to be a smoker now than it was before — the age-specific mortality rates are generally the same over the decades studied — but rather because the smoking population is getting older as young people don’t pursue the habit at the rate they once did. As a result, you get data showing a public health statistic getting worse (the overall mortality of smokers) thanks to broader data showing a public health statistic getting better (fewer younger, healthier people deciding to smoke).

Ralph Lawton, Harvard University, Ellen Meara, Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health, and Jonathan Skinner, Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine

Uranium

Three years ago, uranium producer Cameco invested $2.1 billion in a 49 percent stake in Westinghouse Electric, the company that builds nuclear power stations, trying to shore up the finances of a crucial customer that had been meandering in a world that didn’t want to build large nuclear power stations. Well, they really nailed that, as the renewed interest in extracting carbon-free energy from rocks has revived Westinghouse, and that share would be worth $24.5 billion if Westinghouse indeed proceeds with a $50 billion U.S. stock market listing. Westinghouse’s pipeline for AP1000 reactors stands at 91 opportunities, of which as many as 20 are in the United States. Such a surge in interest would also be a boom for Cameco’s core uranium business; global reactor requirements are expected to increase from 64,500 tonnes of uranium annually to 143,900 tonnes by 2050.

Colin McClelland, Mining.com

Cephalapods

In the 1990s, researchers discovered the Spencer Gulf breeding aggregation, a massive gathering of the meter-long giant Australian cuttlefish off the coast of Southern Australia, where a genetically distinct population of the cephalopod convenes to breed. This year, disaster struck when an algae bloom hit the coast, killing off lots of marine life and, scientists report, devastating the cuttlefish. The South Australian Research and Development Institute estimated that the Spencer Gulf population collapsed to just 1,811 adults, a 97 percent year-over-year decline. The population has taken serious hits before — in 2013, it fell from 150,000 to 13,500 animals and managed to recover to 247,000 by 2020. It won’t be until next year that we see whether enough survived to facilitate a similar recovery.

Erik Stokstad, Science

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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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