Month: January 2021

Enlarge / Workers wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) clean an entry to the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on Sunday, Jan. 10, 2021. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

The attending physician to Congress on Sunday sent an alert to lawmakers warning them that they may have been exposed to the pandemic coronavirus while huddled in a safe room during last Wednesday’s violent insurrection at the US Capitol by supporters of President Trump.

As Ars has previously reported, there was clear risk of mass disease spread at the insurrection. Mostly maskless rioters not following social distancing recommendations may have spread the virus amongst themselves and to lawmakers as they rallied and stormed the Capitol building. In addition, lawmakers and staff who likewise eschew basic public health guidance added to the risk of a superspreading event as members of Congress hunkered down together during the attack.

In the Sunday email alert sent to all members of Congress, attending physician Brian Monahan focused on the latter risk, writing:

Last month, archaeologists in Mexico City unearthed the eastern façade of a tower of skulls near the 700-year-old site of the Templo Mayor, the main temple in the former Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan. It’s a morbidly sensational find, but it’s also a potential treasure trove of information about the people who died at Tenochtitlan in the city’s final centuries. Here’s what the skulls in the tower could tell us if we ask them—and why we'd have to ask very carefully.

Archaeologists found 119 skulls built into the structure, a morbid addition to the 484 skulls found on the northeast side of the tower, which archaeologists rediscovered in 2015. Since 2015, excavations have reached 3.5 meters below modern street level, into the layers of ground once trod by Aztec priests, onlookers, and sacrificial victims. From those excavations, we now know that the 4.7 meter (15.4ft) tall tower was built in at least three phases, starting in the 15^th century.

The nearby Templo Mayor once housed important shrines to the war-god Huitzilopochtli and the rain and farming god Tlaloc. Many of the victims sacrificed to the two gods probably ended up as building blocks for the tower, properly known as the Huei Tzompantli, nearby. A tzompantli is a wooden scaffold for displaying skulls (exactly as the name suggests if you happen to speak Nahuatl; the word means something along the lines of “skull rack” or “wall of skulls”). The temple district of Tenochtitlan once boasted at least seven of them.

Enlarge / NASA’s Juno spacecraft soared directly over Jupiter’s south pole when JunoCam acquired this image on February 2, 2017. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/John Landino)

NASA has announced that it will extend the missions for two of its interplanetary explorers launching during the last decade—the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter and the InSight lander on the surface of Mars.

The Juno extension means the spacecraft will now operate in the Jovian system through 2025. This will effectively transform the spacecraft from a mission to study Jupiter into a full-fledged Jovian system explorer, complete with close flybys of several of Jupiter's moons as well as its system of rings.

Back in the inner Solar System on the surface of Mars, the InSight mission will now run through December 2022. During these additional two years, the lander will continue to operate its seismometer to identify Marsquakes, as well as continue to collect detailed information about weather at the surface.