Month: March 2020

Enlarge / WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 20, 2020: Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci holds up the "15 Days to Slow the Spread" instruction as US President Donald Trump looks on during a news briefing on the coronavirus outbreak. (credit: Getty Images | Alex Wong)

Dr. Anthony Fauci has one of the toughest and most important jobs in government as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The nation's top infectious disease expert, Fauci plays a major role in the coronavirus-pandemic response and is regularly seen at press conferences alongside President Donald Trump—who doesn't share Fauci's inclination and ability to give Americans the most accurate information in a time of crisis.

Fauci addressed his interesting relationship with Trump in a Science Magazine interview published yesterday. "I can't jump in front of the microphone and push him down," Fauci said when asked about moments when Trump makes factual mistakes at press conferences.

Here's the full version of that exchange between Science Magazine reporter Jon Cohen and Fauci:

Enlarge / At the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, Expedition 63 crewmembers Chris Cassidy of NASA (left) and Anatoly Ivanishin (center) and Ivan Vagner (right) of Roscosmos pose for pictures March 11. (credit: NASA)

While much of the world's business has ground to a halt amid the COVID-19 pandemic, spaceflight has been moving along in fits and starts. Most spaceports remain active, and in the United States, launch companies have been classified as "essential" businesses, meaning they are continuing operations, at least to some extent.

And at NASA, they're still flying to the International Space Station. Much of the space agency, including Johnson Space Center, is presently at Stage 3 of NASA's pandemic response plan. This phase lies just short of Stage 4, during which facilities are shuttered except to protect life and critical infrastructure. It seems likely that more of the space agency will move to Stage 4 this week, but NASA will continue to operate the station regardless.

"The teams responsible for supporting the International Space Station from Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center are considered mission-essential personnel and will continue their duties should we move to Stage 4 of the COVID-19 NASA Response Framework," a NASA spokesman said.

Enlarge (credit: Alexander Pryor)

As the last Ice Age tightened its hold on Europe, a group of people living near the Don River piled dozens of mammoth bones into a 12.5m (30ft) wide circle. They may have lived in the shelter of the mammoth bones for a while, huddling around fragrant fires of conifer wood and mammoth bone and making stone tools. But the traces they left are so light that it seems they didn’t stay long—or maybe they only visited occasionally.

A truly mammoth structure

Archaeologists found the bone circle in 2015. It’s one of about 70 mammoth-bone circles scattered around eastern Europe and western Russia, and it’s one of three within a few hundred square meters of each other near the modern village of Kostenki, about 500km (310 miles) south of Moscow. Excavations unearthed the first bone circle at Kostenki during the 1960s. A second structure nearby now lies buried under construction on private land. The third bone circle at Kostenki, discovered in 2015, is the largest and the oldest structure of the sort ever found.

Fragments of charcoal from inside the circle, along with samples of mammoth bone and ivory, radiocarbon-dated to around 20,000 years ago, during the coldest stage of the Last Glacial Maximum. Ice sheets several kilometers thick stretched southward across most of northern and western Europe. But people somehow made a living on the cold, inhospitable steppes just southeast of the glaciers. They also built huge circles out of mammoth bones—archaeologists just aren’t sure why.

Enlarge / Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (credit: Pradeep Gaur/Mint via Getty Images)

As the coronavirus has forced millions of families into lockdown, demand for Amazon's delivery service has surged.

To help the company deal with rising demand, Amazon has prioritized several categories of essential items, including baby products, health items, and pet supplies. The results of that policy can now be seen on Amazon's website: numerous items now take weeks to ship. That's true even if you're a subscriber to Amazon Prime, which is supposed to provide two-day shipping.

If you want AmazonBasics printer paper, for example, you might have to wait until April 21 to get it. An aluminum shovel and an umbrella have the same April 21 delivery date. Washable markers have an estimated delivery date of April 28.