Numlock News: November 3, 2026 • Boring, Thriller, Aratasaurus

Numlock NewsNov 3, 2026

Numlock News: November 3, 2026 • Boring, Thriller, Aratasaurus

Nov 3

By Walt Hickey

Tunneling

China is the top producer of tunnel-digging equipment, with state media saying that the country’s global share of the business is around 70 percent of the market, led by top producer China Railway Engineering Equipment Group. The tunnel-boring machines have recently come under export controls. Beijing argues that in addition to their uses in building subways and roads, tunnel-boring machines can also be used for military purposes, and so the government has curtailed exports to countries and regions with disputes with China. For India, this seems to be pretty targeted, as it is a massive buyer of the equipment, importing $103.75 million worth of tunneling machinery in 2026, of which $70.32 million was from China. While there is some shifting around of boring equipment that can be done, a real issue is that China has also curbed exports of components, and this kind of machinery gets a lot of wear and tear.

Bloomberg News

Halloween

In the week that led right up to Halloween, “Thriller” by Michael Jackson notched No. 20 on the Billboard Hot 100, logging 9.3 million streams in the United States from October 23 to 29, up 49 percent week over week. Other songs that fit the spooky vibe also made it to the charts, with “Somebody’s Watching Me” by Rockwell up 52 percent week over week to 6.3 million streams, and “This Is Halloween” from The Nightmare Before Christmas up 68 percent to 6.1 million streams. Missing the Hot 100 but making it to the streaming charts, we have “Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, which hit 5.8 million streams, and “Ghostbusters” with 5.9 million.

Gary Trust, Billboard

Fuels

Orders for ships that don’t run on oil are running 57 percent ahead of last year, with 53 orders for alternative-fueled vessels in October. In 2026, there have been 364 alternative-fueled vessels ordered, mostly consisting of liquid natural gas-fueled vessels with 230 orders (63 percent of the total). Of note were the four ammonia-fueled car carriers ordered in October, which is a sign that the fuel alternative is still of interest to shipping companies despite being very early in development.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

DST

On Sunday, clocks fell back to standard time, which means that we got this year’s cycle of the “man, it would be great if we had permanent Daylight Saving Time.” The fact is, people think they want that, but when countries have actually implemented this, usually people hate it and roll it back. The United States famously tried permanent DST in 1974 and quit that very same year — it sucks to send kids to school when it’s dark out — and a Russian attempt at permanent DST that started in 2011 wrapped up in 2014. Looking at all cities that have tried to have later winter sunrises, most don’t stick with it. Looking at cities that get nine to 9.5 hours of winter daylight (New York, Chicago, Madrid, etc.) and a sunrise at 8:30 a.m., if they were forced into winter DST, only 35 percent of people who had experienced it are still living under it today. The rest having usually voted or legislated their way back to either the seasonal time-shift or permanent standard time.

Olivia Walch, Contraclockwise

Dinosaur Blood

A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims to have found traces of blood from a 115 million-year-old dinosaur. The finding purports to have isolated the oldest-ever dinosaur red blood cells from the hind limb of an Aratasaurus museunacionalifound in Brazil. This topic is pretty controversial in the field, and researchers have spent decades trying to find evidence of dinosaur blood in fossils; at least 14 studies have tried to describe red blood cells in fossils, but none so far have been especially convincing within the field. The hints of fossilized cells in the bone include rounded structures with sunken centers that were 23 microns long and 20 microns wide on average.

Rodrigo Pérez Ortega, Science

Fencing

The American West has roughly 620,000 miles of barbed wire and other fencing, infrastructure that, while simple, has permanently altered the ecology of the West. Fences are used for ranching, but they also corral and sometimes kill the natural inhabitants of the region and impede migration routes, fragmenting ecosystems. Two events — one, a series of fires devastated large expanses of grazing land and, in some cases, destroyed the fencing that contained them, and two, the commercialization of virtual fence technology around 2021 — coincided in a new set of pilot efforts to fence in herds using tech rather than thousands of miles of barbed wire.

Kylie Mohr, High Country News

Bottle

A new study found that the thickness of a plastic bottle and the weight of a cardboard package have an impact on whether or not it’s recycled, with consumers thinking that lightweight materials are better off trashed rather than recycled. Essentially, if it feels like trash, it ends up in the trash, which is an issue because packagers have attempted to reduce their packaging use by making packaging thinner and, yes, more lightweight. In some cases in the study, lightweight packaging was 92 percent more likely to end up in the landfill than more substantial packaging. The average density of plastic containers found in recycling bins was 60 percent higher than the density of the plastic containers found in trash bins, and each gram per fluid ounce of density increased the chance of being recycled by a factor of 9.86.

Savannah Peat, University of Georgia

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