Elise Kjrstad, ScienceNorway
Lively communities for trade emerged in the Middle Ages and populations grew dense. This created opportunities as well as problems.One of those worries was sanitation, specifically the treatment of human and animal waste.A historian and professor at the University of Stavanger, Dolly Jrgensen, has researched waste disposal in Scandinavian and Northern European Medieval cities.
Alyse Stanley, Earther
The murder-hornet-hunting heroes at the Washington State Department of Agriculture have successfully trapped a male specimenthe first of its kind found stateside.If you're keeping score at home, that brings the grand total of murder hornets found in Washington State to seven, all in Whatcom County.
Chris Lee, Ars Technica
Quantum mechanics, when examined closely, poses some deep questions about reality. These questions often take the form of thought experiments, which are later (usually much later) followed up by real experiments. One of the most difficult and deepest of these is a thought experiment proposed by Eugene Wigner in the 1960s, called "Wigner's friend" (you don't want to be Wigner's friend).
Maryn McKenna, Nature News
As the COVID-19 pandemic caught hold early this year, a small drug company outside Philadelphia was struggling to market a compound that could help patients battling for their lives.Paratek Pharmaceuticals had spent more than 20 years developing and testing an antibiotic named omadacycline (Nuzyra), which went on sale in the United States in 2019 for use against bacterial infections.
Ethan Siegel, Forbes
Is it a wave or is it a particle? Never has such a simple question had such a complicated answer as in the quantum realm. The answer, perhaps frighteningly, depends on how you ask the question. Pass a beam of light through two slits, and it acts like a wave. Fire that same beam of light into a conducting plate of metal, and it acts like a particle.
