Month: August 2021

Enlarge / Two classrooms had to be shut down due to a series of problems with maintaining policies meant to limit the spread of the pandemic. (credit: Andrew Lichtenstein / Getty Images)

On Friday, the CDC released a report that traced the spread of the delta variant through a California elementary school. It's tempting to make this into a story of gross irresponsibility—a teacher was unvaccinated and read to the class while unmasked. But beyond that, it provides a number of warnings about how our public health system remains under stress as we close in on two years since the start of the pandemic. It also reemphasizes how the delta variant ensures that small errors can easily explode into big problems.

One bad apple

The school in question was a small one, with only a bit over 200 students and 24 staff. It is an elementary school, meaning that its student population is also younger than the cutoff for approved vaccine use. The school did a number of things right, though. Class sizes were kept small, and individual classes were kept in separate rooms, with doors and windows kept open and air filtration equipment installed. There was also a standing policy requiring mask use in place.

But not everything was ideal. The CDC notes that two of the 24 staff members were unvaccinated. While the vaccinated can clearly transmit the delta variant, they are likely to be less infectious, and in a worst case they'd be infectious for a shorter period of time.

Enlarge (credit: Pompeii Archaeological Park)

Archaeologists working in Pompeii recently unearthed the tomb and partially mummified remains of a man who died a few decades before the eruption. The man, Marcus Venerius Secundio, according to his epitaph, had once been enslaved, but by the end of his life he’d obtained enough wealth and status to sponsor four days of theater performances in Pompeii.

Rags to riches in Imperial Rome

Archaeologists rediscovered Marcus Venerius Secundio’s tomb in the ancient cemetery, or necropolis, of Porta Sarno in the eastern part of Pompeii, where tourists aren’t allowed. His tomb was large and imposing, with a colorfully painted facade depicting green plants on a blue background; traces of the paint still cling to the stone even after 2,000 years. It was also sealed so well that its occupant’s remains had partially mummified, preserving some soft tissue and a few tufts of white hair, along with some scraps of fabric.

Because Pompeii is both amazingly well-preserved and extensively studied, archaeologists were able to match the name inscribed over the tomb’s entrance to a name on wax tablets in the house of a banker named Lucius Caecilius Jucundus, across the city from the necropolis. The banker’s tablets recorded Marcus as a “public slave” who worked as a custodian in the Temple of Venus, which once stood at the western end of town (that’s almost certainly where the second part of his name, Venerius, comes from). But at some point he became a libertus, or freedman, and began to build a new life for himself.

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  Its looks might still call back to the battlefields of World War II, but there's nothing old-fashioned about the Jeep Wrangler 4xe's powertrain. [credit: Jeep ]

It is not a hard-and-fast rule, but most cars would be better with the addition of some electric motors. There are always exceptions—heavy batteries and an electric motor would ruin a Caterham 7, for instance—but it holds true for most cars. Consider the Jeep Wrangler 4xe, the new plug-in hybrid variant of the nation's favorite rock-crawler.

For non-car people, Wrangler might as well be synonymous with Jeep. The current-generation Wrangler only dates back to 2017, but it still carries plenty of styling cues that hark straight back to the original World War II Jeep. Big wheels project out from the body, protected in plastic arch extensions that house the LED daylight running lights up front.

But it's not a particularly big SUV by the standards of 2021, at 188.4 inches (4,786 mm) long (including the rear-mounted spare tire). The doors signal to you that they're removable by way of large external hinges. The only real clues that this is a plug-in hybrid are some electric blue bits here and there (like the tow hooks) plus the charging port that lives just below the A pillar on the driver's side.

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  The new gen 6 Fossil watches. [credit: Fossil ]

Before Samsung showed up and took over the Wear OS ecosystem, the top Android smartwatch manufacturer was Fossil. Even after Samsung's arrival, Fossil is still going, and today the company announced the Fossil Gen 6 watches.

The Gen 6 Fossil watches are the company's first to ship with Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 4100+, a 12 nm, Cortex A53-based ARM chip. The "plus" at the end of that 4100 model number means there's a low-power co-process on the SoC now, which can handle things like health tracking without waking up the big cores. It looks like the new SoC is the only upgrade over the gen 5 watches. There's still a 1.28-inch OLED display, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage. Fossil doesn't say how big the battery is, but it charges to 80 percent in 30 minutes. The watch has GPS, NFC, Wi-Fi, a PPG heart rate sensor, and is water-resistant.

Fossil's new watches range from $299 to $319, and compared to the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4's $250-$350 price, Fossil's new watches don't make a ton of sense in a post-Samsung Wear OS world.

Over the weekend, Sony's curious new PlayStation 5 hardware revision—same price, same performance, slightly changed internals—began finding its way into fans' hands, and at least one rushed to figure out exactly why it weighs 0.6 lb less than the launch model. The most obvious answer, at least parceled out on a measuring scale, is a smaller, wholly redesigned heatsink element, though the person behind the discovery didn't necessarily make the right call about this PS5 revision being "worse."

Tech reporter Austin Evans posted his findings on YouTube on Saturday, after sourcing a new Japanese PS5 and upgrading his purchase to overnight shipping (holy bank account, Batman). The resulting breakdown is informative, though not entirely authoritative. Evans and fellow YouTuber Jimmy Champane tore down both the new PS5 and a launch model in short order, noticing almost immediately that the newer heatsink takes up far less physical real estate. Before the teardown is complete, one visible heatsink portion near the system's primary fan is reduced enough that a finger can fit in, but that's nothing compared to the final comparison.

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  Old PS5 heatsink (left), new "11-series" PS5 heatsink (right). [credit: Austin Evans ]

The launch model's heatsink included a complete airflow-encompassing plate of copper, along with conductive metal all along the way. The updated heatsink, on the other hand, has been re-engineered to reduce both the base copper plate and the amount of metal attached to the cooling system's heat pipes, all while leaving the heat pipe concept intact—and likely still relying on a liquid metal application on PS5's System-on-Chip (SoC). After weighing the two consoles while fully assembled, Evans then weighed the extracted heatsink constructions, finding these accounted for nearly the entirety of the 0.6 lb difference.