AmericasArgentina s gravediggers plead for vaccines as death toll climbs
Agustin Geist
3 minute read
Ernesto Fabian Aguirre, a gravedigger in the Memorial cemetery, stands next to a coworker as they put on protective equipment before an exercise for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) burials, in Buenos Aires, Argentina May 17, 2021. REUTERS/Agustin Marcarian
Ernesto Fabián Aguirre, a gravedigger in the Memorial cemetery in the suburbs of Argentine capital Buenos Aires, feels like he is going into battle every day as the country s coronavirus death toll mounts amid a new wave of infections.
Argentina s gravediggers are threatening to strike over demands that cemetery workers burying the dead are vaccinated against COVID-19, a test for the South American country s government which has faced hold-ups to its vaccine roll-out. read more
There’s a wild card in the push to return to pre-pandemic life: Many workers don’t want to go back to the jobs they once had. Layoffs and lockdowns, combined with enhanced unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, gave many Americans the time and the financial cushion to rethink their careers. Their former employers are hiring again — and some, like Uber and McDonald’s, are offering higher pay — but workers remain hesitant. In March, U.S. job openings
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3 minutes to read Not the size of an actual man
How the microwave was invented The microwave oven is of the all-time great accidental discoveries of science. In the 1940s, American engineer Percy Spencer was working at Raytheon Technologies testing an active radar while he had a chocolate bar in his pocket. At some point, he noticed that the chocolate had melted into his pocket. Rather than merely changing his trousers, he realised the potential to heat food using a high-density electromagnetic field (and presumably also changed his trousers). He first experimented by getting a bag of popcorn, and attempting to heat that. It worked. He pushed his luck and tried to heat an egg, which exploded spectacularly, thus also inventing the don t put an egg in the microwave rule. Spencer next worked on putting magnetrons (which create microwave radiation) inside a Faraday cage (which blocks electromagne