You could go outside in the sunshine and catch the Delta variant (which is, evidence suggests, easily transmissible even outdoors) from the unmasked hordes; or you could stay in and read this lot instead. I know which I'd rather do 
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- Failure to Launch: Why Jetpacks Never Took Off - ”When Willy Suitor strapped into a rocket belt and soared through the air at Super Bowl I, it wasn't hard to imagine that we would all be flying around someday. But the jetpack future we were promised never came to be. What happened?” What indeed?
- Star Trek’s Warp Drive Leads to New Physics - ”Researchers are taking a closer look at this science-fiction staple—and bringing the idea a little closer to reality.” Once they've got that sorted out, maybe they can get back to the jetpacks?
- DNA Has Four Bases. Some Viruses Swap in a Fifth. - ”The DNA of some viruses doesn’t use the same four nucleotide bases found in all other life. New work shows how this exception is possible and hints that it could be more common than we think.” Because we don't hear enough about viruses these days
- Book of the Dead fragments, half a world apart, are pieced together - ”A torn 2,300-year-old mummy wrapping — covered with hieroglyphics from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead — has been digitally reunited with its long-lost piece that was ripped away.”
- Mars 'copter Ingenuity still flying high, spots hazards for the Perseverance rover - ”Last week, engineers at the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory let the Mars Ingenuity helicopter fly for the ninth time, an amazing achievement that means the semi-autonomous drone has now made four flights past its mission's nominal five. Images it took on this latest jaunt showed terrain ahead of the rover Perseverance's path, including marking some areas that would prove dangerous for the rover to tread.” OK, we may not have jetpacks, but a helicopter on Mars is still really cool
- The Enfield Poltergeist - ”K B Morris revisits the events of The Enfield Poltergeist, a notorious supposed late-70s haunting that continues to spark debate over its authenticity…” I'm going to go out on a limb and say, not authentic?
- The Off-Roading Astronauts of Apollo - ”The later moon missions didn’t grab as much attention as the first landing in 1969, but they had something very cool on the gear front: the lunar rover, a lightweight go-kart that gave crews unmatched mobility on another world.” I was delighted by this thing at the time. My family had only had a car for about four or five years at this point, so putting one on the Moon was so awesome
- Streetonomics - Map app that lets you find out about the rich people from whom streets got their names: ”The city can be thought of as an archeological site - all the historical layers are there, you just have to know how to access them. Computer scientists and cartographers have now associated thousands of street names with corresponding Wikipedia pages and have data mined these pages to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in naming streets after historical figures.”
- "I could stay up half the night trying to crack your code" - Fascinating detective work, with a bit of conjecture, about some key places in the youth of Lennon and McCartney. ”The McCartney's moved to Forthlin Road in Allerton during the summer of 1956, one year before the fete, and at some point he took a job as a paperboy delivering the evening Liverpool Echo on his Raleigh bicycle. It was during this period that Paul first exchanged a few words with the then 15 year old John Lennon. He has never publicly mentioned which newsagents he worked for…” Well, I think it's fascinating, if only because we had close family around these areas in the Sixties so I remember lots of the shops and roads mentioned. My oldest such relative died aged 99 at his home round the corner from the Heath Road shops just a few weeks ago.
- The Art of the Romanian Haystack - While the sun shines: ”At this time of year the fields of the Romanian countryside are full of new haystacks. Over the centuries this particular method of haystack building has become more refined to the point where the haystacks of Romania have their own unique characteristics. Haystacks like this are found nowhere else on earth.” This one is, it must be said, even more unusual than the rest for being up a tree
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