Numlock News: September 4, 2026 • Mercury, Romans, Drosophila

Sep 04, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend! We are off on Monday in observation of Labor Day, have a great long weekend.

Angels

The Los Angeles Angels are up for sale, as the embodiment of MLB owner socialism hits the market. Nobody has squandered talent quite like the Angels ownership, taking prime years of Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani and turning it into absolutely nothing. The only good thing to come out of Arte Moreno’s stewardship of the team was Tungsten Arm O’Doyle. Since 2012, the Angels have had the single worst ratio of dollars per Wins Above Replacement spent on externally acquired players at $11.27 million per WAR. Anyway, ownership is selling the team at a valuation of $4 billion after buying the team off Disney for $184 million in 2003.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Podcast

The podcast industry is supported by just a few whales of advertisers. In the beginning, the entire industry was propped up by benefactors that specialized in delivering email, for some reason. Then, of course, things evolved, and for some reason, it was companies that enabled listeners to obtain postage stamps. Soon after, it was the direct-to-consumer underwear business, and then naturally, of course, the entire audio industry was propped up by mattresses for a solid couple of years. The fall of the house of Casper led to great chaos, in which any number of folk remedies, snake oil, mail-order powders and Gentlemen’s Aides moved in. Now, though, the most powerful person in podcasting is the woman who buys ads for BetterHelp, which has become the top podcast advertiser of all time, with $242 million spent on podcast ads since 2023, running ads on over 1,000 shows at any given moment.

Ashley Carman, Bloomberg

Spray and Pray

Many colleges and universities are opting into the Common App’s direct admissions offering, where they can just offer admission to high school students who didn’t even apply to them. In the 2026-27 cycle, 236 schools are participating in the program, up from 215 in 2025-26 and 119 schools in 2024-25. The schools that tend to go for it are the private, less-selective schools that have been under the most serious pressure in this current environment. The acceptance rate among four-year not-for-profit schools has hit 70 percent as of 2023.

Roshan Fernandez, The Wall Street Journal

Follow The Denarii

A new study attempted to reconstruct the monetary circulation of the Roman Republic based on four million coins found in excavations. Those coins were found in 24,646 hoards and were linked to 5,167 pairs of minting and discovery sites. This data allowed the researchers to approximate broad flows of the Roman economy and its gradual monetization, a process that eventually replaced the straight-up trade or in-kind swaps that defined the informal economy of the Republic. While lots of interpretations place the Roman army at the forefront of disseminating currency among new territory, this study found that only when the provinces were integrated with the broader Roman economic structures did they really develop a permanent demand for currency.

Joao Silva, Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo

Clams

A new analysis looked at the potential implications of climate change on mollusks, projecting significant declines in the size of certain organisms as a result, with the average body length of some declining by 16 percent. For mollusks, that can be a big deal: The projected 16.2 percent decrease in the average length of a Baltic Sea clam would correspond to a 41 percent decrease in the average body mass of the organism. The exception, the study suggests, would be cephalopods; in the Arctic Ocean, the size of octopus tusk shells would increase by 3.3 percent.

University of Helsinki

Drosophila

Scientists at Cambridge announced that they have mapped all 124 million connections of nerve cells in a male fly’s brain, completing an effort that saw the mapping of a female fly’s brain two years ago. According to the researchers, 95 percent of the cells are shared between the brains. Building the connectome — the list of neurons — has been an extensive and painstaking process that has culminated in this 3D map of the brain and nerve cord.

Pallab Ghosh and Gwyndaf Hughes, BBC News

Mercury

The BepiColombo mission to Mercury has hit a significant milestone, as the linked European and Japanese space agency spacecraft have separated as planned from the cruiser. Now 124 million miles away, the conjoined spacecraft will enter orbit around Mercury in November, and will split from one another in December. The mission was launched in 2018 and has travelled six billion miles, going to Mercury the long way; the planet is so very small and so very far away that it took nine planetary flybys to reduce BepiColombo’s energy enough to actually enter Mercury’s orbit.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

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 ·