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Enlarge / The air intake on Mountain Aerospace Research Solution's Fenris engine after its first hotfire last July. The lines around the cone feed kerosene and gaseous oxygen into a combustion chamber, where it is mixed with the air and ignited. (credit: Aaron Davis | Mountain Aerospace Research Solutions)

There's a small airfield about a two-hour drive north of Los Angeles that sits on the edge of a vast expanse of desert and attracts aerospace mavericks like moths to a flame. The Mojave Air & Space Port is home to companies like Scaled Composites, the first to send a private astronaut to space, and Masten Space Systems, which is in the business of building lunar landers. It’s the proving ground for America’s most audacious space projects, and when Aaron Davis and Scott Stegman arrived at the hallowed tarmac last July, they knew they were in the right place.

The two men arrived at the airfield before dawn to set up the test stand for a prototype of their air-breathing rocket engine, a new kind of propulsion system that is a cross between a rocket motor and a jet engine. They call their unholy creation Fenris, and Davis believes that it’s the only way to make getting to space cheap enough for the rest of us. While a conventional rocket engine must carry giant tanks of fuel and oxidizer on its journey to space, an air-breathing rocket motor pulls most of its oxidizer directly from the atmosphere. This means that an air-breathing rocket can lift more stuff with less propellant and drastically lower the cost of space access—at least in theory.

Enlarge (credit: Joel Sorrell | Getty Images)

It's 11:37pm and the pattern shows no signs of shifting. At 1:12am, it’s more of the same. Thumb down, thumb up. Twitter, Instagram, and—if you’re feeling particularly wrought/masochistic—Facebook. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic left a great many people locked down in their homes in early March, the evening ritual has been codifying: Each night ends the way the day began, with an endless scroll through social media in a desperate search for clarity.

To those who have become purveyors of the perverse exercise, like The New York Times’ Kevin Roose, this habit has become known as doomsurfing, or “falling into deep, morbid rabbit holes filled with coronavirus content, agitating myself to the point of physical discomfort, erasing any hope of a good night’s sleep.” For those who prefer their despair be portable, the term is doomscrolling, and as protests over racial injustice and police brutality following the death of George Floyd have joined the COVID-19 crisis in the news cycle, it’s only gotten more intense. The constant stream of news and social media never ends.

Of course, a late-night scroll is nothing new—it’s the kind of thing therapists often hear about when couples say one or the other isn’t providing enough attention. But it used to be that Sunday nights in bed were spent digging through Twitter for Game of Thrones hot takes, or armchair quarterbacking the day’s game. Now, the only thing to binge-watch is the world's collapse into crisis. Coronavirus deaths (473,000 worldwide and counting), unemployment rates (around 13 percent in the US), protesters in the street on any given day marching for racial justice (countless thousands)—the faucet of data runs nonstop. There are unlimited seasons, and the promise of some answer, or perhaps even some good news, always feels one click away.

Enlarge / We'll have to wait a little bit longer for Disney's hotly anticipated live action remake of Mulan (credit: YouTube/Disney)

The murmurs this past week were true: Deadline Hollywood reports that Disney has decided to bump the release date of its live action remake, Mulan, from July 25 to August 21, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to flare up around the world. It is not unexpected: theaters still haven't re-opened in China, with no concrete dates for re-openings in New York and Los Angeles, either. Without those major markets, the financials just don't work.

“While the pandemic has changed our release plans for Mulan and we will continue to be flexible as conditions require, it has not changed our belief in the power of this film and its message of hope and perseverance,” Alan Horn, co-chairman and chief creative officer, and Alan Bergman, co-chairman, The Walt Disney Studios, said in a statement. “Director Niki Caro and our cast and crew have created a beautiful, epic, and moving film that is everything the cinematic experience should be, and that’s where we believe it belongs – on the world stage and the big screen for audiences around the globe to enjoy together.”

As Deadline notes, "The good news here for exhibition is that Disney has a plan to open Mulan in the near future, close to Tenet and not during the holidays or 2021 (or even on Disney+, for that matter)."

The SyFy series Wynonna Earp has trod a rocky road on the way to its fourth season, much to the frustration of its loyal fanbase ("Earpers"). First, the start of S4 production was delayed until late 2019, due to financial troubles at IDW Entertainment. Shooting finally commenced this past January in Alberta, Canada, and was nearly complete when the coronavirus pandemic led to the shutdown of all  film and TV productions. Showrunner Emily Andres and her determined team have nonetheless managed to complete the season, and we now have the first trailer (uncensored, with colorful language fully intact), and an air date: July 26, 2020.

(Some spoilers for first three seasons below.)

The original comic book series created by Beau Smith in 1996 had Wynonna roaming the world hunting down revenants and other demons; the TV series mostly keeps her in her hometown of Purgatory (primarily for budgetary reasons). As I wrote when S3 wrapped way back in October 2018, Wynonna is the the Anti-Buffy: "She's a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, promiscuous, bar-brawling free spirit with a chip on her shoulder. She never even had a shot at being Homecoming Queen in high school."  

Enlarge / Vice President Mike Pence speaks after leading a White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing at the Department of Health and Human Services on June 26, 2020 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Joshua Roberts)

The US logged nearly 40,000 new cases of COVID-19 nationwide Thursday—the highest daily total yet in the course of the pandemic—and many states continue to see an alarming rise in the spread of disease.

Cases have been increasing in 30 states, according to the New York Times’ COVID-19 tracking effort. On Friday, 11 states set their own records for the average number of new cases reported in the past seven days, according to the Washington Post.

Though the rising case counts can sometimes reflect a rise in overall testing, many states are also seeing high and increasing percentages of positive tests—that is, the fraction of test results that come back positive, which is considered a more useful metric for assessing if disease spread is actually increasing. If states increase testing while the spread of COVID-19 stays the same or declines, the fraction of tests coming back positive would gradually decline.