As with last month, the world’s scientists are all focusing on covid-19 producing so many papers, most of them without peer review, that it’s impossible to keep track of them all. I’ll limit myself to only one of these this month and offer some other stuff that is also happening at the same time.

• The one covid-19 article is this comprehensive overview of exactly how the app-based contact tracing framework developed by Apple and Google works. The upshot is that each phone with the app installed will be constantly broadcasting an id and listening for such ids from other phones. The app will be storing the record of what it hears privately but if a user tests positive for the virus, a trusted central authority can send an order to search through the whole network to discover who has been in contact with that person on the days that are deemed infectious. Of course, this also means that each country must implement its own version of the app.
• We’ve all watched Jurassic Park and so know all about ancient dinosaur DNA. But the truth is that DNA decays beginning from death, so it is extremely difficult to recover usable sequences of DNA from so long ago. This article talks about how one team has claimed to be able to recover at least degraded remnants of genes and another team has found genetic traces of microbes that lived inside dinosaurs.
• I’ve covered this before but the continuing phenomenon of insect populations dropping propitiously is worrying enough to talk about it again. This article covers how virtually all surveys from around the world confirm the trend and the cause is still unknown. The implications for the stability of planet’s ecosystem is very serious indeed.
• Finally, here’s one paper that is not directly connected with covid-19 but is relevant all the same. It’s about why primates seem to touch their own faces so frequently and the reason they propose that it’s due to an instinctive need to smell ourselves. As anyone who owns a dog or a cat knows, our pets do frequently smell themselves and this may be the human equivalent. Bringing our hands close to our faces lets us smell our hands, which brings information not only about our own smell but also the smell of what we have touched recently. As to why we might need to smell ourselves, well, read the paper to find out.