It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small. Neil Armstrong
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. Marie Curie
But also—
It's May! It's May! The lusty month of May! Lerner & Loewe, Camelot
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Mark Twain, Following the Equator
And we celebrate them with April Fool's Day.
By March, the worst of the winter would be over. The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run and the world would wake into itself again.
Not that year.
Neil Gaiman, Odd and the Frost Giants
“Do you ever wonder if—well, if there are people living on the third planet?"
"The third planet is incapable of supporting life," stated the husband patiently. "Our scientists have said there's far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.”
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Well, that settles that. Up and coming, Valentine's Day,
"It snowed and snowed, the whole world over,
Snow swept the world from end to end.
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned."
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago
"....when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass,
I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight,
And build me stately palaces by candlelight.”
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
“October extinguished itself in a rush of howling winds and driving rain and November arrived, cold as frozen iron, with hard frosts every morning and icy drafts that bit at exposed hands and faces.”
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
The Sexist Legacy in Star Trek’s Progressive Universe | io9 "'With Picard we have equality. Old baldy, sorry, sir old baldy, he’s the first on the call sheet, but other than that we’re equal. There are men and women and there’s not a preponderance of one sex over the other.'"
The Tricky Math of Herd Immunity for COVID-19 | Quanta Magazine "Ultimately, the only way to truly escape the COVID-19 pandemic is to achieve large-scale herd immunity — everywhere, not just in a small number of places where infections have been highest. And that will likely only happen once a vaccine is in widespread use."
Cosmic Rays May Explain Life’s Bias for Right-Handed DNA | Quanta Magazine "With a series of toy models, the researchers calculated that the biased cosmic ray particles were ever-so-slightly more likely to knock an electron loose from a “live” helix than from an “evil” one, an event that theoretically causes mutations."
All black holes should sport light rings | Astronomy.com "The reason we don’t see a black hole wrapped up in a glowing sphere of light is because we can only see the photons that have escaped the orbits around the black hole at the moment that they were flying directly at us, as they were being slingshot out of a circular cross section of the spherical shell, which looks like a ring of light to us."
If we find life on Mars, what might it be like? | Astronomy.com "By reaching into progressively deeper layers of Mars, investigators may first encounter spores associated with a relatively recent geological era. And by going to even greater depths, they might even find fully vegetative microbes."
The coronavirus is even more sinister than we suspected - Los Angeles Times "Researchers exploring the interaction between the coronavirus and its hosts have discovered that when the SARS-CoV-2 virus infects a human cell, it sets off a ghoulish transformation. Obeying instructions from the virus, the newly infected cell sprouts multi-pronged tentacles studded with viral particles."
Scientists use Neanderthal genes to grow tissue in a Petri dish - UPI.com "Differences in the genes of modern humans have allowed researchers to reconstruct approximately 40 percent of the Neanderthal genome, but scientists say they aren't sure exactly how these archaic genes influence human development."
Chinese study: Antibodies in COVID-19 patients fade quickly | CIDRAP "The authors observe that their findings contrast with what's known about the duration of antibodies to two other key coronaviruses, SARS-CoV, which causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus). Previous findings indicate that antibodies to those viruses last at least a year and often longer, they said."
Susan Choi: When Is a Writer Supposed to Read? | Literary Hub "For a working writer to be cloistered in their house or apartment is not necessarily the strangest set of circumstances. Do you feel that? Do you feel that I’m ready for this and to handle this?"
Katherine Arcement · Diary: Fanfic · LRB 7 March 2013 "If the lure of reading fan fiction is clear, the lure of writing it is less obvious. On the surface, writing fan fiction is pointless: there is no hope of getting paid and very limited glory. So why do people do it?"
Dark Matter Experiment Finds Unexplained Signal | Quanta Magazine "They have uncovered an unexpected excess of events inside their detector that could fit the profile of a hypothetical dark matter particle called an axion. Alternately, the data could be explained by novel properties of neutrinos. More mundanely, the signal could come from contamination inside the experiment."
Coronavirus pandemic shows global consequences of China’s local censorship rules | South China Morning Post "Research published in the journal Nature last month estimated that if strong intervention had been taken against Covid-19 in China a week earlier, cases could have been “dramatically reduced” by 66 per cent.
Acting three weeks earlier, at the start of January, would have reduced the number of cases by 95 per cent, according to the paper by scientists from China, the United States and Britain."
Gardens of the galaxy: can you grow vegetables on Mars? | Science | The Guardian "Wamelink began with garden cress, which he planted on 1 April, 2013. “Not a very handy day,” he reflects now, “because nobody believed us when we started it, especially journalists.” [He] did not have especially high expectations.... But, to [his] surprise, the cress grew—"
Why printers add secret tracking dots | BBC "Some forms of text-based steganography don’t even use alphanumeric characters or symbols at all. Alan Woodward, a security expert at the University of Surrey, notes the example of ‘Snow’ – Steganographic Nature Of Whitespace..."
Publishers Charge the Internet Archive with Copyright Infringement | Publishers Weekly "In late March, the IA announced the creation of the National Emergency Library, which removed access restrictions for some 1.4 million scans of books in its Open Library initiative and made them available for unlimited borrowing during the Covid-19 outbreak."
Coronavirus: The mystery of asymptomatic 'silent spreaders' - BBC News "Investigators resorted to going through the CCTV recordings made at the church that Sunday to search for clues. And they stumbled across something completely unexpected - the woman who'd attended the later service, after the Chinese couple had left, had sat in the seats they had used several hours earlier."
Immunity to coronavirus may be far more widespread than thought | The Spectator "Even if cross-reaction from other coronaviruses does not provide full immunity, it might explain why many people suffer only mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. According to an ONS study of 19,000 people published last week, 79 per cent of people who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 showed no symptoms up until the day they were tested."
SpaceX Just Launched NASA Astronauts Into Space - The Atlantic "This afternoon’s successful launch means SpaceX has edged out Boeing in the effort to send NASA astronauts to space. Both companies have faced technical issues and schedule delays since they received their NASA contracts in 2014, and each side has publicly resisted describing the effort as a “race.” Doing so would risk the perception that the companies were focused on speed over safety. But SpaceX can bask a little bit in this milestone, knowing it beat a longtime NASA contractor that, for younger commercial companies in the industry, represents an old way of space travel."
On the Moon, Astronaut Pee Will Be a Hot Commodity | WIRED "In the barren lunar environment, every drop of liquid matters. So whether it's used as a building material, a fertilizer, or life support, it looks like pee is going to have a big role to play as humans venture out into the solar system. Space travel has never seemed so glamorous."
Prolonged COVID-19 virus shedding noted in China | CIDRAP "The authors said that the identified risk factors for prolonged viral shedding should be considered when formulating strategies for quarantine and called for a large, multicenter study to further explore these factors."
Is Reopening Safe After COVID-19? We Won’t Know for Weeks. - The Atlantic "Even in states without particularly ambitious reopening plans, evidence shows that tests and cases are being counted in ways that can mislead casual observers trying to understand how an outbreak is evolving. Virginia, for example, briefly combined its statistics for tests of active infections and antibody tests, which indicate that a person might have been infected at any point in the past. This makes tying daily testing numbers to particular restrictions or behaviors useless."
What the Coronavirus Does Inside the Body: Anatomy of a Killer - DER SPIEGEL "A battle of attrition ensues, one that determines whether the patient will quickly recover or whether the disease will get the upper hand. Will the immune system stop the attack in the upper respiratory tract? Or will the pathogen be able to find its way into the lungs? The answers to those questions determine whether the illness becomes life threatening or not."
‘Milestone’ Evidence for Anyons, a Third Kingdom of Particles | Quanta Magazine " In 2016, three physicists described an experimental setup that resembles a tiny particle collider in two dimensions. Fève and his colleagues built something similar and used it to smash anyons together. By measuring the fluctuations of the currents in the collider, they were able to show that the behavior of the anyons corresponds exactly with theoretical predictions."