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New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago – cities across the US are closing down because of the Covid-19 epidemic. The economic impact is already dire. Millions are probably already out of work, and economists are certain we are heading for recession. Donald Trump has a solution: get back to work. But it is a solution that many think will make matters worse, leading to the loss of even more lives and a deeper economic crisis.

The administration is now reportedly considering easing some physical distancing directives in order to halt the collapse of the economy.Many experts think that’s a terrible idea.The result would be “an open door to chaos”, said Professor Michael Greenberger, a former counselor to the United States attorney general and now director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland.

Greenberger said he could understand the desire to support the economy but that such short-term thinking could be devastating.“There are no two ways about this. The shutdown of the economy is damaging. It is a balancing of risks. I think we will be in worse shape in the public health sector and the financial sector if we just unthinkingly send people back to business as usual.”

NASA Says Signs of Liquid Water Flowing on Mars

Though young Mars was inundated by rivers, lakes and maybe even an ocean a few billion years ago, the modern moisture is modest. Scientists have long known that large amounts of water remain — but frozen solid in the polar ice caps.

They named the streaks recurrent slope linae, or R.S.L.s, and many thousands of them have now been spotted.

A new class of astronauts is being sought by Nasa, now that a return to crewed missions from American soil is on the horizon.

The US space agency said it would accept applications for its astronaut corps from 14 December to mid-February 2016 and announce the successful candidates in mid-2017.

Since the space shuttle was mothballed in 2011, the only way to get into space has been to secure a seat aboard the three-person Russian Soyuz capsule and fly from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. While the Soyuz will continue to ferry people to and from the International Space Station, other vessels are on course to take over some of the trips. Boeing and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are developing the CST-100 Starliner and Crew Dragon spacecraft, respectively. Meanwhile, Nasa is building the Orion deep space exploration vehicle.

New findings from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars.

"We found the hydrated salts only when the seasonal features were widest, which suggests that either the dark streaks themselves or a process that forms them is the source of the hydration.

This is a significant development, as it appears to confirm that water -- albeit briny -- is flowing today on the surface of Mars."

We are all still in this together. But some of us are now falling so much deeper into it than others.

No wonder some were furious, then, when it emerged that Prince Charles had been tested despite suffering from what’s said to be only a mild case of coronavirus. Buckingham Palace insists it was done for sound clinical reasons, and even if it wasn’t, one princely test makes no practical difference to the ability of hundreds of thousands of key workers to get one.

Houses that normally sit shuttered and forlorn until Easter started opening up again the minute the schools shut – and so many people have been trying to book hideaway cottages on remote Scottish islands that ferry crossings are being restricted. Tiny communities with no cases of their own are understandably afraid of what wealthy urban refugees may bring with them, and fear curdles all too easily into resentment.

Three and a half billion years ago, waves splashed and streams surged across this dusty expanse on Mars now known as Jezero Crater. On a nascent Earth, chemistry was coagulating toward the exalted state we call life.

Astronomers, philosophers and science fiction writers have long wondered whether nature ran the same experiment there as on Earth. Was Mars another test tube for Darwinian evolution?

So humans have sent their progeny across time and 300 million miles of space in search of long-lost relatives, ancient roots of a family tree that might be traced in the Red Planet’s soil.

e keep hearing that this is a war. Is it really? What helps to give the current crisis its wartime feel is the apparent absence of normal political argument.

this is not the suspension of politics. It is the stripping away of one layer of political life to reveal something more raw underneath

In a democracy we tend to think of politics as a contest between different parties for our support. We focus on the who and the what of political life: who is after our votes, what they are offering us, who stands to benefit. We see elections as the way to settle these arguments

The number of new renewable energy projects applying for planning permission reached a four-year high in the UK last year as energy companies raced to meet the rising demand for clean electricity.

The jump in applications last year was the biggest annual increase in recent years and 75% higher than the number of annual planning submissions made three years ago. There were just 154 submissions in 2016, rising to 185 in 2017.

Planning submissions for clean energy projects are expected to rise in the years ahead due to the government’s decision earlier this month to lift a block against subsidising onshore wind projects that was put in place almost five years ago.

A record 3.3 million people filed claims for unemployment in the US last week as the Covid-19 pandemic shut down large parts of America’s economy.

he number of new jobless claims filed by individuals seeking unemployment benefits rose by more than three million to 3.28m from 281,000 the previous week. The figure is the highest ever reported, beating the previous record of 695,000 claims filed the week ending 2 October 1982.

Across the US, laid off workers have overwhelmed state labor departments with claims for unemployment benefits. In New York City, which now accounts for roughly 5% of global Covid-19 cases, there has been a 1,000% increase in claims.

Britain faces a “Covid decade” of social and cultural upheaval marked by growing inequality and deepening economic deprivation, a landmark review has concluded.

Major changes to the way society is run in the wake of the pandemic are needed to mitigate the impact of the “long shadow” cast by the virus, including declining public trust and an explosion in mental illness, the British Academy report found.

the report brings together more than 200 academic social science and humanities experts and hundreds of research projects. It was set up last year at the behest of the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance.

Astronauts on the moon or Mars may be growing their homes, rather than building them, according to NASA.

Transporting habitats or even the materials for habitats that astronauts can safely inhabit during a lunar mission, or an extended stay on Mars, will be expensive. And they will likely take up a lot of space to shuttle them from one planet to another, when other valuable resources may be needed.

Astronauts could bring a much more compact habitat made from lightweight materials embedded with fungi. These could survive long-term spaceflight and once the habitat was placed on the surface, all the astronauts would need to do is activate the fungi by adding water. Read MoreThe habitat would protect humans while also protecting the lunar or Martian surface because the fungi would be contained within the structure.

Potentially life-giving water still flows across the ancient surface of Mars from time to time, NASA scientists said Monday in revealing a potential breakthrough in both the search for life beyond Earth and human hopes to one day travel there.

Mike Ashley has issued a public apology after his spat with the government about trying to keep his Sports Direct chain open when non-essential businesses were ordered to close.

“I am deeply apologetic about the misunderstandings of the last few days,” Ashley said in an open letter. “Given what has taken place over the last few days, I thought it was necessary to address and apologise for much of what has been reported across various media outlets regarding my personal actions and those of the Frasers Group business.”

Ashley said on Friday: “Our intentions were only to seek clarity from the government as to whether we should keep some of our stores open. We would never have acted against their advice. In hindsight, our emails to the government were ill-judged and poorly timed, when they clearly had much greater pressures than ours to deal with. On top of this our communications to our employees and the public on this was poor.”

Every day brings news of developments that, as recently as February, would have felt impossible – the work of years, not mere days.

disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds

he pessimistic view is that a crisis makes bad things worse.

although the transformation of the role of government in less than two weeks has been genuinely jaw-dropping, this is not yet the same as a wartime crisis in some very important ways. These differences need to be understood, not least because it may help to avoid the error, long familiar in military strategy, of mistakenly setting out to fight the last war rather than tackling the one that we actually face.

Britain in 2020 is not the Britain of 1939, let alone the Britain of 1914. We are an infinitely more connected, more individualistic and more informed society today than we were then.

the incomplete character of Sunak’s huge spending spike. Johnson may say that the state is standing behind society “through thick and thin” but the state is not yet standing behind households, behind renters and the self-employed. At the height of the second world war, public expenditure topped 80% of national income. We are nowhere near that figure yet.

Donald Trump has announced that the US would temporarily suspend most travel from the European Union, as the country reckons with the spread of coronavirus and the White House grapples with the severity of the situation.

The restrictions, which would begin on Friday and last for 30 days, would not apply to US citizens or to travelers from the UK.

During the rare address to the nation, Trump defended his administration’s response while laying blame on the European Union for not acting quickly enough to address the “foreign virus”, saying US clusters had been “seeded” by European travelers.

Exactly a month after Donald Trump tweeted that the US had the coronavirus outbreak “very much under control”, the World Health Organization delivered a stark and jarring reality check: America faces being the centre of a pandemic that has paralysed much of the world.

Coronavirus has raced across the American continent with the aid of a chronic lack of preparation, deep-rooted dysfunction in the US healthcare system, and a president who has repeatedly dismissed the crisis and is now looking to scale back containment efforts in favour of restarting economic activity.

More than 46,000 people in the US have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and nearly 600 have died.

An aide to Andrew Cuomo says the New York governor groped her in the governor’s residence, marking the most serious allegation among those made by a series of women against the embattled Democrat, according to a report published in a newspaper Wednesday.

reported that the woman, who was not identified, was alone with Cuomo when he closed the door, reached under her shirt and fondled her. The newspaper’s reporting is based on an unidentified source with direct knowledge of the woman’s accusation.

The three-term governor faces harassment allegations from five other women

The $2.4 billion spacecraft will hit the top of the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 miles per hour and then come to a complete stop seven minutes later.

That the one-ton rover will end up on Mars on the afternoon of Feb. 18 is nearly certain (presuming it is able to launch before the middle of August, when the planet moves too far away from Earth)

The only question is whether Perseverance will be on the ground in one piece, or smashed to bits.

at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.