"...so we switched it off and on again, because the machine didn't believe it either," a junior researcher in my lab told me on Thursday.
The machine measures official explanations. We aimed it at Russia after authorities there ordered a mass quarantine following the unexplained death of a plague researcher. Unconfirmed reports mention a lab accident. Our reading was zero.
Zero is not exciting. We see it a lot. To be careful, we also measured a control group. A control group is the same thing under normal conditions, so you know what normal looks like. Here, that meant how much Russian officials explain on a quiet day when nothing has happened. That reading was also zero. So the result holds.
We took twenty-six readings across the week. Twenty-five were flat. Then, on the twenty-sixth, the needle moved.
