At https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2019/10/ancient-genomes-prov... ... a team has hanalysed plague victims from the UK, France, Germany, Russia, and Switzerland in order to gain more info on the secondary outbreaks - from the 14th to 18th centuries AD. The Black Death itself occurred in mid 14th century and appears to display evidence of a single strain of the virus, However, there was subsequently a host of later outbreaks of the plague, some of them quite devastating.

This is one of the big stories this week - on the origin of life (are scientists are on the verge of showing us how life developed on the Earth). Go to https://phys.org/news/2019-10-compounds-enceladus-ice-grains.html ...  For an added bonus you can also go to https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/10/03/new-organic-compounds-found-in-en... ... which comes with lots of interesting comments (and an equal number of not so interesting comments). Wheat and chaff and all that.

Below is a beautiful image of a so called coronal loop system on the Sun as seen by the ultra violet cameras on the Solar Dynamics Observatory. The image covers 50,000 miles of the Sun's surface and can be seen, again, at https://phys.org/news/2019-09-solar-corona.html ...

A paper in Science Advances - see https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aav37693 ... uses data from a Chinese satellite system, the 'Dark Matter Particle Explorer', in order to masure cosmic ray protons up to the energy of TeV. The object of the satellite based telescope, nicknamed Wukong (the monkey king), is to study the proportions of dark matter by taking a closer look at high energy gamma rays and electrons.