Month: November 2018

Microsoft has unveiled a new set of icons that the Office apps will start using. Office 365 customers will see their apps switch to the new icons over the next couple of months, as Microsoft continues to refresh the look and feel of its core productivity suite.

The last time the Microsoft Office apps got new icons was 2013, with the same set of icons also used by Office 2016 and the perpetually licensed Office 2019. Since then, Office has got a great deal more mobile with apps for iOS and Android, it gained a bigger Web presence, it added a bunch of collaboration features, and it has seen many of its users switch from the perpetual licenses to the continuously updated Office 365.

Top row, from left to right: Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint. Bottom row, from left to right: OneNote, SharePoint, Teams, Yammer, Skype. (credit: Microsoft)

The new icons are meant to somehow reflect these changes. The letters adorning each icon have been reduced in size, with the remainder of the space used to show a highly stylized representation of the application. The colors are a bit brighter, too. Oddly, there are already some inconsistencies in the designs; OneDrive doesn't have a letter at all (it's just a cloud), and Skype uses the old proportions, with a letter that's much bigger than any of the others.

Enlarge / The spider in question, without its young. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Milk comes from mammals. It’s kind of a distinctly mammalian thing. Even our government knows that. And yet, Chinese scientists have documented jumping spiders that provide their young with droplets of a nutrient-rich fluid from a furrow on the mother’s body. It is the sole nourishment for the spiderlings until they start foraging, and even then they still drink it until they get slightly more mature. Results are reported in Science.

Cockroaches and doves also provide their young with a substance described as “milk,” because it comes from their bodies and provides the exclusive source of sustenance to the young. Cockroach moms deposit this substance into the brood sac where their embryos are developing.

Dove parents—mothers and fathers both—generate crop milk and feed it to the baby birds for their first few days of life, until the babies can digest real food. Crop milk consists of nutrient-filled cells sloughed off in flakes from the inside of the parent birds’ crops, which are under their necks.

Enlarge / Digital reconstruction of the original basilica. (credit: Lateran Project, Newcastle University)

The Archbasilica of St. John Lateran doesn’t quite look its age. The basilica, where the Pope presides in his role as Archbishop of Rome, was already ancient when it was rebuilt in the 1650s. Its walls still hold some of the original material used to build the cathedral under Emperor Constantine in 312 CE. And beneath the modern church lies the original Roman foundation. Excavations since the 1700s have opened up a network of dark, cramped spaces called scavi beneath the four-hectare site of the cathedral.

Centuries of Roman history lie buried in the darkness in layers stretching down to 8.5 meters (27.89 feet) below the modern floor of the cathedral, and the subterranean archaeological sites are like a honeycomb through the city’s Caelian Hill. Now, using a combination of laser scanning and ground-penetrating radar, archeologists have made a complete map of the site.

Basilica, now in 3D

Much of what’s in the scavi has been excavated and studied before, but Lateran Project co-director Ian Haynes and his colleagues say their work is the first detailed survey of the entire underground complex of ruins. They started mapping the exposed sites in the scavi with laser scans in 2012. That work, now completed, allows them to create a digital map of everything that’s currently visible thanks to the old excavations.

Enlarge / Chinese geneticist He Jiankui speaks during the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing at the University of Hong Kong days after the Chinese geneticist claimed to have altered the genes of the embryo of a pair of twin girls before birth, prompting outcry from scientists of the field. (credit: S.C. Leung/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

As more details regarding the first gene-edited humans are released, things continue to look worse. The researcher who claimed the advance, He Jiankui, has now given a public talk that includes many details on the changes made at the DNA level. The details make a couple of things clear: we don't know whether the editing will protect the two children from HIV infections, and we can't tell whether any areas of the genome have been damaged by the procedure.

All of that raises even further questions as to whether He followed ethical guidelines when performing the work and getting consent from the parents. And, more generally, nobody is sure why He chose to ignore a strong consensus that the procedure wasn't yet ready for use in humans. In response to the outcry, the Chinese government has shut down all further research by He, even as it was revealed that a third gene-edited baby may be on the way.

While the US already has rules in place that are intended to keep research like He's from happening, a legal scholar Ars spoke with suggested there may be a loophole that could allow something similar here. In light of that, it's important to understand the big picture He has potentially altered. What exactly happened in China and why does it concern so many in the scientific community?