Month: October 2017

Google Calendar on the Web is getting a new look. Google announced that the company is "taking a lot of what you know and love from Calendar’s mobile application, like the modern color palette and sleek design, and bringing it to the Web." Calendar is getting a "Material" redesign.

Calendar's existing design is something like six years old. It debuted in 2011 and uses a "red and gray" motif that just isn't Google's style anymore. "Material Design" is Google's current design philosophy, which debuted in 2014 on Android 5.0 Lollipop. The design language usually mixes white backgrounds with bold splashes of color, animation, and lots of whitespace. Information is presented in grids of cards, and the design language usually brings in smartphone motifs like "hamburger" buttons that open navigation panels. Material Design sites tend to look like big smartphone apps.

Costume design by Lowri Best. Shot and edited by Justin Wolfson. (video link)

Earlier this year, our video production team began spitballing ideas for a Halloween costume project. They likely thought the Ars editorial crew would suggest some boilerplate pop-culture "nerd" ideas, revolving around famous sci-fi or horror characters. Instead, they sighed after reviewing our long, technically challenging list full of stuff like robotic suits and diabolical person-sized packet-sniffing devices. (It was a stab at putting the "trick" into "trick or treat.")

In the end, we settled on a project that leans a little closer to the traditional affordable, last-minute costume ideas you'd find on the Web, though with a decent DIY tech-geek bent: your own see-through flesh wound.

Enlarge (credit: Atlas of the Underworld)

Last week, scientists released a monumental interactive catalog that tracks 94 ancient tectonic plates lurking deep within Earth’s mantle, a resource they’re calling an “Atlas of the Underworld.”

Although scientists have known for decades that tectonic plates plunge into the Earth’s interior at subduction zones, until recently, those plates disappeared off the geological map once they stopped generating earthquakes, which happens after they’re around 670km below the surface. In the last few years, seismic tomography, which uses waves from earthquakes to make images of the planet’s interior, has restored their visibility. It has revealed subducted plates sinking in the mantle all the way down to the core-mantle boundary, 2,900km below Earth’s surface.

Now, Dutch scientists Douwe van der Meer, Douwe van Hinsbergen, and Wim Spakman of Utrecht University have catalogued 94 separate pieces of ancient tectonic plates, called “slabs,” in the mantle, linking them to dates where geological events happened while they were on the surface. Some subducted almost 300 million years ago, while others can be traced to active faults, such as those along the western coast of the Americas.

Enlarge / Margaret Hamilton holds a LEGO figure of ... herself. (credit: LEGO)

A new playset from LEGO will honor four key women in NASA history—astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, and pioneering astronauts Sally Ride and Mae Jemison. The 231-piece set will be released on Nov. 1, with a recommended selling price of $24.99.

First proposed in July, 2016 by the deputy editor of MIT News, science writer Maia Weinstock, on the LEGO Ideas website, the project reached 10,000 supporters in just 15 days. "The set clearly touched and inspired many," Weinstock said. In addition to the historical minifigures, the set includes three builds that put the work of each woman into historical context.

LEGO