Month: March 2021

Enlarge / Maxars WorldView-2 collected new high-resolution satellite imagery of the Suez canal and the container ship Ever Given that remains stuck in the canal north of the city of Suez, Egypt. (credit: Satellite image (c) 2020 Maxar Technologies)

Every day, some 50 ships pass through the Suez Canal, the waterway slashed between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. These are big ships: Some 10 percent of the world’s maritime trade traverses the Suez. But not Wednesday.

That’s because a ship called the Ever Given, en route to Rotterdam, Netherlands, from China, is wedged between the canal’s sandy banks. The vessel, operated by Taiwan-based Evergreen Group, is one of the biggest in the world: as long as four football fields, as wide as the wingspan of a Boeing 747, and, thanks to the 200,000 tons of containers stacked on board, as tall as a 12-story building.

It might be there a while. It’s not easy to unstick a gigantic shipping vessel, experts say. The Suez Canal Authority, the Egypt-owned body that owns and operates the canal, has not yet said when it expects traffic to resume.

Enlarge / Apple's 2020 iPad Air. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Today, Apple began rolling out iOS 14.4.2, iPadOS 14.4.2, and watchOS 7.3.3, and the company issued an advisory to users to upgrade as soon as possible. Like iOS/iPadOS 14.4.1 before it, this update addresses a security flaw.

Additionally, Apple released a similar security update—12.5.2—for older devices like the iPhone 5S or 6 that cannot run iOS 14.

The release notes for iOS 14.4.2 and iPadOS 14.4.2 are minimal, simply stating:

Enlarge / A health advisory sign on a beach in Florida. (credit: Getty | Jeff Greenberg)

In mid-January, US cases of COVID-19 were in a nosedive from a towering record of over 315,000 new cases in a single day earlier in the month. And now, the pace of vaccinations has reached a heartening clip of 2.5 million per day. There’s almost a whiff of freedom from our pandemic confines in the sweet spring breeze.

But as anxious as we all are to return to normal life, the pandemic is not yet done with us.

The dramatic decline in cases ended weeks ago and plateaued at a disturbingly high level, matching daily case numbers seen in mid-October, at the base of the winter surge. Meanwhile, more transmissible variants of the pandemic coronavirus are swirling around the country. The B.1.1.7 variant—estimated to be around 50 percent more transmissible than earlier versions of the virus—is expected to become the predominant virus circulating in the US next month.