Numlock Sunday: March 24, 2026 • Armour, Dolphins, WNBA

Mar 24, 2026

By Walt Hickey

WNBA

After extensive negotiations between the players’ union and the league, WNBA players appear poised to enter the upcoming season with a truly historic deal that would push the average player salary to $584,000 this upcoming season. The deal also raises the minimum salary in the WNBA to $270,000 per season guaranteed. That is more than the supermax salary across the entire league was last season, just $249,244. The players also secured a 20 percent revenue share, and the salary cap increased 364 percent — the single largest salary cap increase in the history of American professional sports.

Rachel Bachman, The Wall Street Journal

Thanks For All The Fish

Serious research into dolphin communication began in the 1960s, and in 1970, the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program began tracking a population of wild dolphins. As a result of this methodical work, researchers know the age, sex and biological relation(through the mother) of pretty much all of the 170 dolphins in the community. This is cool because the dolphins are outfitted with hydrophones on their forehead, allowing researchers to not only pick up on communication but also to discern who is talking to whom and what their relationship might be. The Sarasota Dolphin Whistle Database contains almost 1,000 such recorded sessions of 324 individual dolphins. We know now that dolphins develop signature whistles that are stable over their lifetime, and sometimes those whistles are similar to those of their mother; we also know that dolphin mothers modify the sound of their own signature whistle when communicating with their calves, using a higher pitch, just like we do when talking to young children.

Laela Sayigh, The Conversation

Armour

Under Armour decided to scale back its investment in sports marketing over the past decade, spiking many of its college sports partnerships in the process. And it shows in the men’s March Madness tournament. This year, just nine teams strolled onto the court in Under Armour, down from 16 as recently as 2024. By comparison, Adidas is the official gear of 14 teams, the Nike Jordan sub-brand has six teams and Nike has 39 teams.

Jacob Feldman and Eben Novy-Williams, Club Sportico

Nails

A new study presented at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society explores nail polish that might make it possible for long nails to work on smartphone screens. Touchscreens in general work thanks to capacitance — a small electric field is disrupted by, say, a finger and informs the sensors where someone is touching. The issue is that fingernails are not conductive, so someone with long nails may have difficulties using a smartphone. The study looked at 13 commercially available clear-coat polishes and 50 different additives to find which ones had conductive topcoats. They found that taurine and ethanolamine made for solid conductive topcoats.

American Chemical Society

Seats

Since January 2020, the number of business and first class seats on domestic flights rose 27 percent, vastly outpacing the rate of coach seats, with economy class seats up just 10 percent over the same period. All of the airlines are significantly increasing the number of premium seats in their aircraft. In 2016, Delta allocated 10.7 percent of seats to premium, and that rose to 12.6 percent today. American Airlines’ 9.3 percent in 2016 rose to 11.4 percent today, and United’s 9.5 percent in 2016 rose to 11.9 percent.

Dean Seal, The Wall Street Journal

Fraud

Online ad fraud consumes an estimated 20 percent of global ad spend, but a new paper published in Management Science found that eliminating the phenomenon — where fake view numbers consume real ad dollars — is considerably more complicated than it may seem. Despite factoring in known ad fraud deterrents, the study found that the online ad economy actually worked best not by cutting but by increasing payments for publishers while ratcheting up the investment in ad fraud tech, even if that meant more false positives.

Benjamin Kessler, George Mason University

Drought

A new paper published in Nature Microbiology argues that drought conditions boost the ability of both soil-dwelling and human-hosted bacteria to resist antibiotics. This is concerning because the expectation is that rising temperatures will make drought conditions more common. The study found that the aridity of hospital locations was strongly correlated with antibiotic-resistant infections, making the immediate impact of the study relevant to antibiotic treatments in arid regions. Still, 25 percent of the Earth is expected to be in drought or desert-like conditions by 2050.

K. R. Callaway, Scientific American

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