Tag Archives: Quarantines
Science Podcast: Ash Trees At Risk, Organizing Active Matter And Robot Swarms
Freelance journalist Gabriel Popkin and host Sarah Crespi discuss what will happen to ash trees in the United States as federal regulators announce dropping quarantine measures meant to control the emerald ash borer—a devastating pest that has killed tens of millions of trees since 2002.
Instead of quarantines, the government will use tiny wasps known to kill the invasive beetles in hopes of saving the ash. Sarah also talks with Pavel Chvykov, a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about the principles for organizing active matter—things like ant bridges, bird flocks, or little swarms of robots.
Morning News Podcast: Covid Vaccine Delivery Issues, New ‘Smart’ Cities
We’re getting closer to the vaccine finish line with three promising candidates. Distributing this vaccine will be a challenge everywhere but especially in states that have large rural areas like Alabama where a three-phase plan to get the state vaccinated is being finalized next week.
- Plus, the logic behind the CDC’s new quarantine guidelines.
- And, the new hope for creating smart cities.
Guests: Alabama Public Health state health officer Dr. Scott Harris and Axios’ Sam Baker and Jennifer Kingson.
Health: ‘Travel Bubbles’- Can They Revive Air Travel?
Travel bubbles are under development in some places in an effort to revive air travel, which has plummeted during the pandemic. WSJ explains how reopening the skies without quarantine requirements at both ends of a trip could help reboot the global economy.
Illustration: Crystal Tai
Travel: “Closed City – Milan Under Quarantine” (The New Yorker Videos)
Scenes from a day of weirdness in quarantine, as Milan socially distances to avoid spreading the coronavirus.
Travel & Quarantines: Author Frances Mayes Writes Of Poet John Keats In Naples, Italy In 1820 (NYT)
From the New York Times (March 26, 2020):
I have seen Naples from his vantage of a ship anchored offshore — one of the most sublime locations in the world, that sweep of coast stacked with apricot, carmine, azure and rose villas; the blue, blue U of the harbor; the emphatic Vesuvius anchoring the view.
In October of 1820, typhus raged in Naples. With his artist friend, Joseph Severn, the British poet John Keats rocked in the city’s harbor for 10 days, not nearly the quaranta giorni — 40 days — that give us our word quarantine.
Before this journey, Keats always felt intense melancholy. In “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time,” he wrote “… mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.” (And in the smooth pentameter of “Ode to a Nightingale”: “I have been half in love with easeful death.”) Not a holiday, this voyage out of England was a desperate trip to the sunny climate of Italy. His cough had grown steadily worse. Since the morning he’d seen a splotch of blood on his pillow, he knew he had little chance of surviving the consumption that had invaded his lungs. His last-ditch: Go to Rome. Meanwhile, exile at sea.
Monocle 24 “The Urbanist” discusses the impact that quarantines can have on cities and what lessons city planners can learn when an outbreak causes borders to close. Here is a report from the ground on the changing nature of city life in Milan.
Boomers Daily 