How far? Micro droplets spewed out with a sneeze can travel as far as 27 feet, an MIT researcher determined. That finding has big implications for social distancing in this time, since it suggests germs droplets can fly outward at a hundred miles an hour and linger in the air for minutes, researcher Lydia Bourouiba says. “That has implications for how many people you can put in a space,” she tells Nat Geo’s Sarah Gibbens. The accompanying images from the research are fascinating, scary, and a little gross.
How fast? Federal health officials estimated early this month that more than 300,000 Americans could die from COVID-19 if all social distancing measures are abandoned, and later estimates pushed the possible death toll even higher, according to documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity. Some outside experts say even that grim outlook may be too optimistic.
Already vulnerable: People battling opioids and other drugs find themselves more isolated and with limited access to addiction management tools during the COVID-19 pandemic, writes Lois Parshley for Nat Geo. For instance, care facilities are strained as social and health-care workers themselves are getting sick. “The people who are already the most vulnerable are made even more vulnerable in a pandemic,” says Corey Davis, a public health lawyer at the Network for Public Health Law.
Okay, Einstein: Astronomers are fascinated with a star that, every 16 years, dances with oblivion as it swings frightfully close to a monster black hole. Its fraught orbit, Einstein had said, allowed this star to experience the full strangeness of the universe. Now, after 27 years of close observation, astronomers can say the star is indeed experiencing strangeness. For one thing, the New York Times reports, the star’s egg-shaped orbit does not stay fixed in space, and instead loops around the black hole like a spirograph drawing.
Shakin’: Plate tectonics has sculpted the landscape as we know it today, building mountains, carving out basins, and driving volcanic eruptions. Now, researchers have found what may be the earliest direct evidence for the movement of tectonic plates, Nat Geo reports. By studying the magnetic signatures of a bulbous mound of rusty red rocks in Australia, researchers show the landscape was making a sedate trek roughly 3.2 billion years ago—more than 400 million years older than previous records of such geologic movement.
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