Month: March 2020

Enlarge (credit: Willmott et al. 2020)

Archaeologists recently excavated a mass burial of at least 48 men, women, and children on the grounds of a medieval monastery in Lincolnshire, UK. One person’s teeth contained traces of bubonic plague DNA, and radiocarbon dating suggests that these people were victims of a 14^th century outbreak. It’s the first time archaeologists have found a mass grave for plague victims outside of a city like London or Hereford, and it reveals that even small country villages struggled to bury the masses of plague victims.

A macabre surprise

University of Sheffield archaeologist Hugh Willmott and his colleagues didn’t expect to find skeletons when they dug a trench on the grounds of Thornton Abbey. They thought the geophysical anomaly they were preparing to excavate was part of a 1607 mansion built nearby. But instead, they wrote, “the excavation immediately revealed articulated human skeletal remains.” The dead lay in rows, packed so closely that they’d have been touching, with the feet of one row lying between the heads of the next.

Even more surprisingly, the skeletons included at least six women and 21 children, so they definitely weren’t all monks from the abbey. The 48 bodies in the wide, shallow grave probably included people from the surrounding countryside who died at St. James hospital, adjacent to the monastery. In fact, the grave might have held nearly half the 14^th-century population of the surrounding parish, all buried together. 

Enlarge (credit: Hulu)

T-Mobile's wireless home Internet service could become more widely available later this year, but potential customers should be aware of a limitation listed in the terms of service: it is "not compatible with some live TV streaming services," according to T-Mobile.

The reason for this limit isn't immediately apparent, but complaints in customer forums show that the problem affects Hulu's live TV service. T-Mobile has been piloting its Home Internet plan at up to 50,000 homes over the past year, and some of the early adopters haven't been able to use Hulu + Live TV.

The problem appears to be that Hulu's system for verifying a user's home location interprets the T-Mobile router as a mobile hotspot instead of a home Internet device. This isn't an unreasonable assumption, since the device connects to T-Mobile's LTE network in order to provide in-home Wi-Fi, so it basically is a mobile hotspot. But other live-TV streaming services apparently work fine on the T-Mobile home Internet plan.

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

A paper published last June was catnip for those who are desperate to explain climate change with anything but human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. It was also apparently wrong enough to be retracted this week by the journal that published it, even though its authors objected.

The paper’s headline conclusion was that it described a newly discovered cycle in the motion of the Sun, one that put us 300 years into what would be a thousand-year warming period for the Earth. Nevermind that we’ve been directly measuring the incoming radiation from the Sun and there has been no increase to explain the observed global warming—or that there is no evidence of a 2,000 year temperature cycle in the paleoclimate record.

Those obvious issues didn't stop some people from taking this study as proof that past warming was natural, and only mild and unavoidable warming lies in our future.

Enlarge / You won't be able to hold this in your hands any time soon thanks to the coronavirus.

The planned launch of the TurboGrafx-16 Mini later this month has been delayed "until further notice" due to the spread of the coronavirus, publisher Konami announced earlier today.

The plug-and-play retro console, originally set to launch with dozens of games on March 19, has been pushed back because "the manufacturing and shipping facilities in China have encountered an unavoidable suspension due to the current coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak... We deeply apologize for the significant inconvenience, and we humbly ask your understanding and patience while we keep our close attention on the situation."

The delay follows warnings from other gaming hardware manufacturers that availability of existing products might be impacted by the virus' spread. Nintendo said last month that it expected shortages of Switch hardware and peripherals in the Japanese market due to disruptions to the Chinese supply chain (this despite the company moving some of its hardware production to Vietnam last year). And Facebook-owned Oculus warned to expect further shortages of the Quest VR headset as the company sees "additional impact to our hardware production due to the coronavirus."

Enlarge / The real Census form will look a lot more like this, and a lot less like a Trump campaign website. (credit: liveslow | Getty Images)

Facebook infamously has a broadly laissez-faire policy for political candidates. If you're running for office, you can lie as much as you want in your paid and unpaid content—with one small catch. Anything that lies about voting or the census, such as sharing fake registration links or deliberately spreading incorrect polling dates, is prohibited. Even if it comes directly from the Trump campaign.

It just turns out that Facebook needs a lot of prodding—in the form of negative media attention—to follow through.

The site Popular Information first reported on the Trump campaign's ads early yesterday. The sponsored posts, which appeared on the accounts of President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, were paid for by the Trump Make America Great Again committee, a joint fundraising effort by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.