Month: March 2020

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aurich Lawson)

Verizon Wireless and AT&T say they're both waiving mobile-data overage fees to help customers deal with the coronavirus pandemic, but the fees will not be waived automatically. Instead, Verizon and AT&T users have to contact the carriers' customer service and say they're experiencing pandemic-related financial hardship to get the fees dropped.

Unlike Verizon and AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint are providing customers unlimited data during the pandemic without requiring them to contact customer service. T-Mobile announced on March 13 that it is upgrading all customers on limited plans to unlimited smartphone data (excluding roaming) for 60 days. Sprint, which is being acquired by T-Mobile, announced the same day that it is doing the same.

Verizon announced its overage-fee-waiver program in a press release Monday and offered details on how it will work in a FAQ:

Enlarge / In Plague Inc. this screen would be considered a good start. But in an upcoming game mode, it would be considered a disaster in the making.

The worldwide spread of coronavirus may feel a little too familiar for players of Plague Inc., the eight-year-old game that asks you to shepherd a deadly disease seeking to kill all of humanity. Now, developer Ndemic Creations says it is working on a new update that flips the game on its head by "let[ting] players save the world from a deadly disease outbreak."

Ndemic says it is "accelerating work" on the free new mode, which was developed in consultation with the World Health Organization and the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, Ndemic said in an announcement. In it, players will have to balance managing disease progression and boosting healthcare systems as well as controlling real-world actions such as triaging, quarantining, social distancing, and closing of public services."

In addition to the update, Ndemic says it donated $250,000 to the Coalition of Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and the WHO COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. Plague Inc. players will soon be prompted to consider a similar donation of their own in the game.

Enlarge (credit: University of Oregon)

Millennia ago, a stone court would have hosted teams of players wearing belts and loincloths using their hips to knock a hard rubber ball toward goals at either end of the court. The ball game, which re-enacted a creation story recorded in the Maya religious text Popul Vuh, was a major part of political, religious, and social life for the Maya and the Aztec, and for the Olmec before them. But archaeologists don’t yet know much about where people first started playing the game or how it became a cultural phenomenon that spread across the area that now includes Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Layers of ball courts

The ball court—a stone-floored alley about 50 meters (165 feet) long, bounded by steep stone walls and earthen mounds—once occupied a place of honor in the heart of the ancient city. But sometime between 1174 and 1102 BCE, the people of Etlatongo dismantled parts of the court and ritually “terminated” its life. That ceremony left burned bits of plant, mingled with broken Olmec-style pottery, animal bones, shells, and a few human bones (which may or may not have come from a later cemetery) scattered on the carved bedrock floor of the court and atop the earthen mounds that ran the length of its sides.

But beneath that 12^th century BCE ball court lay another, even older one, dating to 1374 BCE. That's roughly when (as far as archaeologists can tell from the available evidence) the formal version of the game—the one played on elaborate stone courts for crowds of wealthy, high-ranking spectators in major urban centers—was still being developed. Archaeologists Jeffrey Blomster and Victor Salazar were surprised to find a ball court so old in the mountainous highlands of Mexico instead of the Olmec-dominated tropical lowlands, where archaeologists have assumed the game got started.