Новости за 24.12.2021

Hundreds of thousands of obituaries have been written for the pandemic’s dead—including several prematurely drafted on behalf of American cities. “New York City is dead forever,” a viral blog post declared in August 2020. Tech workers allegedly abandoned San Francisco in droves. The pandemic “ended the boom of cities that started in the 1990s,” according to The Hill. And the urban expats were all in the market for a country estate.

As the world braces itself for the spread of Covid-19’s highly transmissible omicron variant, more than a few questions remain unanswered. To what extent will waning immunity from vaccines leave people vulnerable to severe disease? Could these things grow worse in the future, with other yet-to-emerge variants?

In August 1868, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded Franz Vester of Newark, New Jersey a patent for a coffin outfitted with a rope, a ladder, and a bell. The bell, situated atop a square tube extending aboveground from an opening at the coffin’s head, was connected to a rope that dangled down the tube into the coffin. The ladder similarly extended down the tube. If the corpse chose to rejoin the living, it could climb up the ladder. Should that prove too much of a strain, it could instead ring the bell to halloo for assistance. Читать дальше...