Quit the overzealous cleaning
Health officials have a simple message for those people still militantly wiping down every surface to ward off the coronavirus: You can stop now. The Centers for Disease Control has confirmed that the risk of surface transmission is “considered to be low.” Early in the pandemic, researchers warned that the virus might survive for days on plastic and metal, and that people could become infected if they touched a contaminated surface and then their nose, lips, or eyes. But there’s now overwhelming evidence that Covid-19 is primarily an airborne disease. So the CDC wants people to abandon so-called hygiene theater and focus on the real threat: the tiny virus-bearing aerosolized droplets that linger in unventilated spaces. Extra disinfecting is now only recommended for schools, homes, and other indoor settings where there has been a suspected or confirmed Covid case within 24 hours. Many scientists have been urging the health agency to revise its guidance for months. “I’m kind of wondering what took them so long,” Emanuel Goldman, a microbiologist at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, tells TheAtlantic.com. “There is so much inertia in the scientific establishment.”
from Wisconsin in the bellies of large planteating dinosaurs, reports SmithsonianMag .com. Long-necked sauropods often swallowed stones to help grind up fibrous plants, a trick still used by some birds and reptiles today. Known as gastroliths, these rocks acquire a smooth and rounded texture—which is what made the Wyoming specimens stand out from the fine-grained mudstones they were found among. To establish their origins, researchers crushed the rocks and dated the zircon crystals inside them. The crystals were about 150 million years old—matching the age of rocks in southern Wisconsin, some 600 miles away. “We figured that once they were ingested, they were carried and eventually deposited out,” says lead author Joshua Malone, from the University of Texas at Austin. It’s impossible to confirm whether the rocks in question are indeed gastroliths, which are usually discovered in or around dinosaur remains. Still, researchers believe zircon analysis of confirmed gastroliths could be a new way to measure dinosaur migrations.