Dear Physics Comunity,

No va – Falcon with Dragon didn’t go, rescheduled for Saturday, news here.

Academic Continuity Meeting

MIT Forward – a newsletter about planning for Fall very popular – 58% open rate, very few unsubscribes.

Yossi Sheffi – proposed a scheme from now on the have freshman year completely online, then they apply to MIT as sophomores.  Slides here.

Cindy Barnhardt – talked some more about 2+3, slides here.  Hard to tell – may be getting traction.  Followed by questions and discussion.

If you have comments or concerns about the Fall plans, see here.

Pulse survey – wants to know how you are doing in the COVID-19 era.

Physics Department

Baryons – are protons and other nuclear matter.  Cosmologists can compute how many there should be, but when astronomers count up the baryons in galaxies, they come up about a factor of two short.  I think recent observations concluded they were in warm interstellar gas.  Now radio astronomers have used Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) to measure the column density of electrons between the FRB at cosmological distances and confirm the result.  Story here and paper here.

Superspreading – recent work seems to indicate that SAR-CoV-2 is spread by a few highly contagious individuals rather than everyone with some average R value.  I’m still digesting.  Story from Science here and original Nature article here.

Los Endos

Rejections – good article from Science on handling “noes” in your career.

Peter