Month: May 2020

Enlarge / A World Health Organization advisory. (credit: World Health Organization)

The Department of Homeland Security is reportedly issuing alerts to wireless telecom providers and law enforcement agencies about potential attacks on cell towers and telecommunications workers by 5G/coronavirus conspiracy theorists. The DHS warned that there have already been "arson and physical attacks against cell towers in several US states."

The preposterous claim that 5G can spread the coronavirus, either by suppressing the immune system or by directly transmitting the virus over radio waves, led to dozens of tower burnings in the UK and mainland Europe. Now, the DHS "is preparing to advise the US telecom industry on steps it can take to prevent attacks on 5G cell towers following a rash of incidents in Western Europe fueled by the false claim that the technology spreads the pathogen causing COVID-19," The Washington Post reported last week.

The DHS alert will include "advice on ways to reduce the risk of attack, including installing appropriate sensing and barriers, cyber-intrusion detection systems, closed-circuit television and monitoring drone activity near towers," the Post article said. A telecom-industry official said that carriers in the US "have seen sporadic attacks on their cell towers that were apparently prompted by COVID-19 disinformation" over the past few weeks, the Post wrote.

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  An Atlas V rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Saturday morning. [credit: ULA ]

On Sunday morning, an Atlas V rocket built by United Launch Alliance took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The rocket hauled the secretive X-37B space plane into orbit for the US Space Force.

The launch webcast ended just five minutes after the launch due to the classified nature of the mission, but the rocket company said it inserted the spacecraft into its target orbit. As a result, this X-37B (there are two different vehicles that rotate flights) successfully began what is likely to be an approximately two-year mission to conduct scientific research (and who knows what other kinds of activities for the military).

This launch was delayed from Saturday morning due to poor weather over the Florida-based spaceport, and selfishly we're glad for the one-day scrub. Clearer skies on Sunday meant that images captured by remote cameras set up by Ben Cooper, who shoots photos for United Launch Alliance, benefited from clear skies and brilliant sunlight.

Enlarge / Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in December 2019. (credit: Scott Heins/Getty Images)

Uber is laying off another 3,000 workers, the company announced in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. That's in addition to the 3,700 workers the company laid off earlier this month. Uber drivers, whom the company treats as independent contractors, are not directly affected.

"Given the dramatic impact of the pandemic, and the unpredictable nature of any eventual recovery, we are concentrating our efforts on our core mobility and delivery platforms and resizing our company to match the realities of our business," CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in the SEC filing. "That’s led us to some painful decisions today."

Uber's core ride-hailing business has been devastated by the coronavirus pandemic. The Wall Street Journal reports that Uber's rides business was down 80 percent, year over year, in April.

Enlarge (credit: Hatala et al. 2020)

Near the end of the last glaciation, a group of people walked barefoot along the shores of Lake Natron. They walked side by side, their paths never crossing each other as they headed southwest. It’s tempting to wonder what they might have thought if they’d known that the soft volcanic ash beneath their feet would preserve their tracks for thousands of years.

Bones can tell you things about how a person lived their life, but footprints are a snapshot of action in progress. It’s one thing to know that an ancient person spent a lot of time throwing things or carrying things, and it’s something much more immediate and personal to see exactly where that person walked, climbed a slope, or crawled into a muddy cave. Footprints, in some ways, are more startlingly intimate links to the past than bones. And at Engare Sero, just south of Tanzania’s Lake Natron, 408 footprints reveal how an ancient group of hunter-gatherers foraged.

The other half of the hunter-gatherer economy

Today, the footprints offer a look at something that’s often missing from the archaeological record: the work done by women and the gathering half of the hunter-gatherer economy. Based on the size, depth, and proportions of the prints, it looks likely that 14 of the people walking by the ancient lakeshore were women. Two of the others were probably adult men, and the last was probably a young man.