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Warner Bros. dropped the latest trailer for Wonder Woman 1984 today during the DC Fandome online event, giving us our first real look at Kristen Wiig's villainous Cheetah. Bonus: we get to see a miraculously revived Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) don parachute pants in an attempt to blend with the times, much to the amusement of Gal Gadot's Diana Prince.

Inspired by the comic book heroine created by William Moulton Marston in the 1940s for DC Comics, Wonder Woman made her big-screen debut in the DCEU with 2016's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, followed by 2017's Justice League. As we reported previously, the first fell short of box office expectations; the second bombed outright. So when Jenkins took on Wonder Woman's origin story, she deliberately departed from the grim humorlessness and dark sensibility of those earlier films, bringing a brighter energy and wit to her tale, along with the usual action. That vision paid off: Wonder Woman went on to gross $821 million worldwide and earned critical raves, making it the most successful of the DCEU films thus far.

Since we're now in the 1980s, Diana is operating in a Cold War scenario, taking on Pedro Pascal's villainous Maxwell Lord, a shrewd and powerful businessman. Wiig plays Barbara Ann Minerva, a British archaeologist who will eventually evolve into her arch-nemesis Cheetah.

Enlarge / Fishing vessels in Seattle. (credit: Getty | Art Seitz)

Hints of protective immunity against the pandemic coronavirus have surfaced in the wake of a recent COVID-19 outbreak that flooded the crew of a fishing vessel.

The coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, infected 104 of the 122 people on board, about 85 percent, during a short voyage. But trawling through data collected before and after the ship set sail, researchers noted that the 18 spared from infection just happened to include the only three people on board that had potent, pre-existing immune responses against SARS-CoV-2. Specifically, the three sailors were the only ones found to have SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies, which are proteins that circulate in the blood and completely sink the infectious virus.

The numbers are small and the finding is not definitive. Additionally, the study appeared this month on a pre-print server, meaning it has not been published by a scientific journal or gone through peer review. Still, experts say the study was well done and significant for netting data that hint that potent, pre-existing immune responses from a past infection can indeed protect someone from catching the virus again.

Enlarge / A Cessna Grand Caravan, flown by a pilot as photographed. But... (credit: Cessna)

The conditions are not ideal for our landing. A hard wind is blowing over the low hills east of San Francisco, and at just the wrong angle—straight across the runway where we’re set to touch down. But as we ease into our final approach, our two-winged shadow clipping the suburban homes below, the veteran pilot sitting beside me makes a gentle suggestion. “I like to do it hands up. Like a roller coaster,” he says.

He removes his hands from the wheel of our aircraft, a 27-year-old Cessna Caravan that once shuttled United Nations dignitaries in southern Africa. It’s nothing especially fancy, with aspects that feel more go-kart than airliner. The cockpit is filled with manual toggles and analog dials; pulleys connect the pedal directly to the rudder at the tail. But recently, this plane underwent some modifications. As we descend past 500 feet, the 15-knot gusts hitting our side and the pilot’s hands still hovering, the wheel and pedals begin to jostle, compensating for the wind with inhuman precision. The descent remains smooth—serene, even, as we touch down.

“It will be very uneventful, almost boring,” Maxime Gariel, the chief technology officer of Xwing, had assured me shortly before our fully autonomous takeoff, flight, and landing. “That’s what we’re aiming for.” That hadn’t seemed to mean much coming from Gariel, an aerospace engineer whose interest in planes began by jumping out of them for recreation. But “almost boring” is an apt assessment. After all, the last thing anyone wants out of pilot-free air travel is excitement.

Enlarge / Hand made face masks drying in Southeast France. (credit: ICHAUVEL / Getty Images)

On March 13, the day the New-York Historical Society closed its doors to the public, Rebecca Klassen, an associate curator for material culture, was scrolling through Instagram when something caught her eye. A friend from the gym had posted an image to her story of a massive bottle of Purell. At the time, store shelves across the five boroughs were already bereft of disinfectants. The picture, Klassen says, was reminiscent of “some kind of night run in the frantic search for sanitizer.” It was captioned “liquid gold.”

The post prompted Klassen to send two messages. The first was an email to Margaret K. Hofer, the Historical Society’s museum director and vice president, asking whether they ought to start collecting items from New Yorkers related to the coronavirus pandemic. The second was a DM in response to her friend’s story. “Hey, can I have that when you’re done?” she asked. “I want to add it to our museum collection.”

People tend to think of archives as massive troves that are compiled long after an era has ended or someone has died. But when it comes to COVID-19, archivists, curators, and librarians nationwide are assembling the record of how the pandemic is impacting their communities in real time, collecting everything from makeshift masks to journal entries to protest signs. Their mandate is both urgent and sweeping: Gather items from a broad swath of residents that, viewed together, tell the story of a particular region’s collective experience of coronavirus. “A lot can be lost over time,” says Ayshea Khan, the Asian American community archivist at the Austin History Center. “Memories can shift, things can be thrown away. It’s important to archive present moments when they happen, as much as we can, to ensure an accurate representation of our city’s history.”