Enlarge / Rim fragments of a chamber pot being excavated at a Roman villa site in Sicily. (credit: R.J.A. Wilson) Ancient Roman archaeological sites are littered with ceramic pots, and it can be challenging to definitively determine the purpose of any given pot—for instance, if it was used for storage or as a portable toilet […]
Enlarge / A child getting a vaccination on February 19, 2021, in Bonn, Germany. (credit: Getty | Ute Grabowsky) The Food and Drug Administration, Pfizer, and BioNTech announced on Friday that they are abandoning plans to pursue the authorization of a two-dose regimen of COVID-19 vaccines for children ages six months to four years. Instead, […]
Enlarge / X-ray technicians take a chest X-ray of an unvaccinated COVID-19 patient on the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) floor at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, U. S., on Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2022. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg ) A bout of COVID-19 can take a hefty toll on the heart and blood vessels; people who […]
Enlarge / SpaceX’s stacked Starship vehicle complete with its impressive launch tower. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann) STARBASE, Texas—Shortly after SpaceX founder Elon Musk completed a 75-minute presentation on Starship Thursday evening, I huddled with a few veteran space reporters. What, we discussed, were the headlines from the event? No one was sure, as we agreed that […]
Enlarge / A fully stacked Starship and Super Heavy rocket on Thursday morning in South Texas. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann / Ars Technica) Welcome to Edition 4.32 of the Rocket Report! There are plenty of international happenings this week, with progress in Europe, Asia, and North America. But the biggest news may have come from SpaceX’s […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) Prior to the pandemic, the opposition to vaccines was apolitical. The true believers were a small population and confined to the fringes of both major parties, with no significant representation in the political mainstream. But over the past year, political opposition to vaccine mandates has solidified, with a steady stream of […]
Enlarge / This artist’s impression shows a close-up view of Proxima d, a planet candidate recently found orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. (credit: ESO/L. Calçada) We’ve now cataloged thousands of planets that orbit distant stars. For most of them, our knowledge is limited to basic statistics: […]
Enlarge / Section of the so-called “Tavistock letter,” written by Charles Dickens in his idiosyncratic shorthand. The crowd-sourced transcription, now 70 percent complete, reveals a dispute between Dickens and The Times of London. (credit: Public domain) Last October, a collaboration called The Dickens Code project made a public appeal to amateur puzzle fans and codebreakers […]
Enlarge / Artist’s impression of low Earth-orbit satellites like those launched by SpaceX and OneWeb. (credit: NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / P. Marenfeld ) NASA has warned that SpaceX’s plan for 30, 000 more Starlink geostationary satellites could cause problems for science missions, human spaceflight, the Hubble telescope, and ground-based telescopes that look for […]
Enlarge / Photo taken on Jan. 20, 2022 shows a beach resort hit by the tsunami on the outskirts of Nuku’alofa, capital of Tonga. (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency ) The ultra-transmissible omicron coronavirus is now spreading in Tonga, causing the archipelago nation’s first COVID-19 outbreak as it tries to recover from an underwater […]