Month: June 2020

Enlarge / Signage stands outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S, on Saturday, March 14, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

As states reopen and people begin to ease back into public life, so too is the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it seems.

Today, Friday, June 12, the CDC held its first COVID-19 press conference in just over three months. Though the pandemic has ravaged much of the US in that period, the last time the country’s leading public health agency held a briefing on the crisis was March 9.

In today’s briefing, CDC Director Robert Redfield and CDC Deputy Director of Infectious Diseases Jay Butler introduced two new sets of suggestions for how members of the public can stay safe from the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, as restrictions ease.  One set of recommendations relates to prevention measures for people considering resuming normal activities, like going to the post office or a restaurant. The other is a set of “considerations” for events and mass gatherings.

Enlarge / T+2 seconds and the Falcon 9 rocket is lifting off. (credit: SpaceX)

6am ET Saturday Update: Just before sunrise along the Florida coast, a Falcon 9 rocket successfully lifted off on Saturday. The rocket performed nominally, ultimately delivering its payload of three SkySats and 58 Starlink satellites into orbit. This was the eighth flight of the current design of Starlink satellites, and the ninth launch of a large batch of them.

After the mission, the first stage successfully landed on a drone ship. SpaceX has now landed 55 first stage boosters.

Original post: Early on Saturday morning, SpaceX will go for its third launch in two weeks with another Starlink mission into low Earth orbit. This will bring the total number of Starlink Internet satellites launched to date to nearly 540.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Hoof it through the national parks of the western United States—Joshua Tree, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon—and breathe deep the pristine air. These are unspoiled lands, collectively a great American conservation story. Yet an invisible menace is actually blowing through the air and falling via raindrops: Microplastic particles, tiny chunks (by definition, less than 5 millimeters long) of fragmented plastic bottles and microfibers that fray from clothes, all pollutants that get caught up in Earth’s atmospheric systems and deposited in the wilderness.

Writing today in the journal Science, researchers report a startling discovery: After collecting rainwater and air samples for 14 months, they calculated that over 1,000 metric tons of microplastic particles fall into 11 protected areas in the western US each year. That’s the equivalent of over 120 million plastic water bottles. “We just did that for the area of protected areas in the West, which is only 6 percent of the total US area,” says lead author Janice Brahney, an environmental scientist at Utah State University. “The number was just so large, it's shocking.”

It further confirms an increasingly hellish scenario: Microplastics are blowing all over the world, landing in supposedly pure habitats, like the Arctic and the remote French Pyrenees. They’re flowing into the oceans via wastewater and tainting deep-sea ecosystems, and they’re even ejecting out of the water and blowing onto land in sea breezes. And now in the American West, and presumably across the rest of the world given that these are fundamental atmospheric processes, they are falling in the form of plastic rain—the new acid rain.

Enlarge / World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a press conference on COVID-19 at WHO headquarters in Geneva on March 11, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Fabrice Coffrini )

On May 29, President Trump said his administration would take immediate action to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization.

"Because they have failed to make the requested and greatly needed reforms, we will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization, and redirecting those funds to other worldwide and deserving, urgent global public health needs," Trump said at the time, while criticizing the WHO's response to the coronavirus pandemic and claiming that "China has total control" over the United Nations agency.

But now, two weeks later, there's nothing to indicate that Trump has followed through on his plan. In an article yesterday titled "US hasn't taken action to withdraw from WHO despite Trump pledge," The Hill wrote that "no steps toward a formal withdrawal have been taken," and that "a WHO spokesman told The Hill that the agency had received no formal notification that the United States would withdraw."

Enlarge (credit: Langley et al. 2020)

For more than 100,000 years, the earliest humans hunted Pleistocene megafauna with wooden throwing spears. But by at least 64,000 years ago, people in Africa had invented a deadly new way to hunt: the bow and arrow. Bows and arrows eventually became a staple of hunting and warfare for cultures on five continents, but we’re not sure exactly when or how that Paleolithic weapons proliferation took place.

Archaeologist Michelle Langley and her colleagues recently found an important clue in a Sri Lankan cave called Fa-Thien Lena: 130 bone arrowheads, dating to around 48,000 years ago. The discovery is the oldest evidence of bows and arrows ever found outside Africa. And it hints at how people adapted to survival in challenging new environments like the Arctic of Siberia, the high altitudes of Tibet, and tropical forests in Africa, Asia, and Melanesia. The invention of new technologies like this helped give Homo sapiens the edge we needed to conquer the world.

“There are a number of ways that bow-and-arrow technology could have got to Sri Lanka,” Griffith University Langley told Ars. “It could have been brought from Africa with a traveling population. It could have been independently innovated in Sri Lanka. Or it could have been innovated in Africa (or elsewhere) and then brought along trade routes or social networks by word of mouth or an example being brought along. At the moment, we have no idea which!”

Enlarge / People who felt more threatened by COVID-19 and ranked high on scales of emotionality and conscientiousness were most likely to hoard toilet paper when the coronavirus shutdowns began in March. (credit: Emmanuele Contini/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Back in March, we reported on the strange phenomenon of people scrambling to stockpile toilet paper as the coronavirus pandemic led to widespread adoption of shelter-in-place and social-distancing policies. Now German scientists have pinpointed a couple of key personality traits that appear to be linked to this kind of hoarding behavior, per a new paper in the journal PLOS ONE.

Consumer behavior researcher Kit Yarrow told Ars in March that toilet paper hoarding is at least partly an attempt to gain a sense of control when the world feels uncertain and dangerous. "When we feel anxious, which I think all of us do right now—it would be sort of abnormal to not feel a little anxious—the antidote to anxiety is always control," she said. "And since we can't really control the track of this disease, we turn to what we can control, and that's why people are shopping. It's like, 'Well, I feel like I'm doing something, I feel like I'm preparing. I feel like I'm taking control of the thing I can control, which is stocking up.'"

As for why people hoarded toilet paper in particular, according to Yarrow, this kind of panic buying could be a case of our social primate brains reacting to newsfeeds full of striking but sometimes disorienting visual cues—like images of store shelves devoid of paper products. "Toilet paper sort of became the thing that the media in particular was really focused on, and that then cued people into thinking about [it]," she said. 

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  The Nokia 9, with five cameras. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Remember Light? Light was a company with the wild idea of improving smartphone and other compact cameras by using lots of tiny camera lenses. Plenty of smartphones today have multiple cameras that function as a lens kit with different optical qualities, but Light combined several lenses into a single camera. Its biggest project was a collaboration with HMD for the five-camera Nokia 9, and it also made the L16 camera, a $2,000 point-and-shoot camera with 16 lenses.

Despite the launch on a Nokia phone last year and future agreements with Sony and Xiaomi, Light has quit the smartphone business. Android Authority checked in on the company and learned that Light is “no longer operating in the smartphone industry." Sure enough, if you visit Light's website, the company seems focused on machine vision for self-driving cars and other robots. Most references to smartphone collaborations, like the dedicated page at light.co/smartphones, have been taken down.

Light's technology on the Nokia 9 seemed interesting, but it was also a rather expensive, hardware-based solution that really just did image stacking, which you can do with a single camera and some fancy software. The Nokia 9 had five 12MP sensors that acted like a single camera. A single shutter press would capture five simultaneous pictures, which would then be blended together to form a single image. The sensors weren't all the same, using a combination of RGB and monochrome cameras, allowing the phone to capture a wider range of light.