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Enlarge / A simulated view of Gale Crater Lake, measuring about 150km across, on Mars about 3 billion years ago. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/MSSS)

Mars clearly once had a lot of water—there are simply far too many features that clearly formed in a watery environment for that to be a matter of debate. What's less clear is how much of that water was liquid and for how long. While some features clearly indicate that liquid water was present for a long time, others likely formed under glacial ice.

It's not clear whether the differences are a matter of timing—a wet period followed by an icy one, for example—or due to regional differences in Mars' climate. It's difficult to tell in part because we can't get climate models of Mars to produce a climate that's wet enough for long enough to form a lot of watery features.

To try to put some constraints on what the ancient Martian climate might have looked like, a team of planetary scientists decided to take a careful look at some of the once-watery features identified on the surface of the red planet. Timothy Goudge, Caleb Fassett, and Gaia Stucky de Quay (yes, that's a planetary scientist named Gaia) identified a series of lakes, and used the features of the lakes to put some constraints on the precipitation that fed them.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

After hastily granting approval last week for a COVID-19 vaccine that has yet to enter rigorous clinical trials, Russia has now announced plans to give the vaccine to more than 40,000 volunteers in a trial that starts next week.

The “previously planned post-registration” injections are part of a “randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled multicenter clinical study” of the vaccine, dubbed Sputnik V, according to an August 20 press release from the Russian Direct Investment Fund, which has financially backed the development of the vaccine. The more than 40,000 people for the trial will be recruited from more than 45 medical centers, the press release added.

On August 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Sputnik V had won regulatory approval, making it the first COVID-19 vaccine in the world to achieve domestic approval. Putin hailed Sputnik V as a breakthrough and even announced that one of his daughters had already received one dose of the two-dose vaccine.

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  OnLeak's Pixel 5 render.

The Pixel 4a just started to ship yesterday, but we're already getting leaks of the Pixel 5. Google made the odd move of confirming the Pixel 5 alongside the Pixel 4a launch, and now thanks to OnLeaks, we're getting an idea of what Google's new flagship will look like.

OnLeaks previously nailed the Pixel 4a design eight months before launch, so his Pixel 5 render is worth paying attention to. As usual, this is a render that is most likely based on CAD files that need to be sent out to accessory manufacturers ahead of launch. That means we're getting the general layout of the device components and display, but some of the finer details could be wrong.

Anyway, the Pixel 5 render looks like a slightly upgraded 4a with a better camera, and that's about it. That means on the front you get a modern all-screen design with a hole-punch camera and slim bezels, and on the back, you get a Pixel 4-style camera block and the shocker inclusion of a rear fingerprint reader. The render shows three cameras, but the site describes the phone as having "dual cameras, an unknown sensor, and an LED flash." There's also no headphone jack.

Enlarge / If you're back in the office, this helpful song will help you remember the cardinal rule of social distancing. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

If you told any executive at a major corporation in mid-2019 that close to half of the US workforce would be working from home within the next year, they would have at least raised a skeptical eyebrow (and then probably called security to have you removed). Yet, here we are.

Major technology companies, including Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, have closed their physical offices until well into 2021. Twitter has told many employees that they can work from home permanently. And now that we have nearly six months of involuntary widespread work-from-home behind us, many other organizations are also reconsidering the value of office space.

In April, a Gallup poll showed 62 percent of the workforce working from home, and 59 percent hoping they could continue to do so as much as possible once the pandemic is under control. While the numbers have since dropped to some degree—Stanford Institute for Economic Research figures in June showed only 42 percent of the US workforce working from home full-time—the fact remains that people's relationship with their workplace has been dramatically restructured, perhaps permanently.