Month: June 2021

Enlarge / It may not look like much, but you can actually learn a lot from a fossilized leaf that preserves insect damage. (credit: Donovan et. al.)

He knew what it was as soon as he saw it: the signature sign of a bird landing. He’d seen hundreds of such tracks along the Georgia coast. He’d photographed them, measured them, and drawn them. The difference here? This landing track was approximately 105 million years old.

Dr. Anthony Martin, a popular professor at Emory University, recognized that landing track in Australia in the early 2000s when he passed by a fossil slab in a museum. “Because my eyes had been trained for so long from the Georgia coast seeing those kinds of patterns, that’s how I noticed them,” he said. “Because it literally was out of the corner of my eye. I was walking by the slab, I glanced at it, and then these three-toed impressions popped out at me.”

Impressions of toes may seem to be pretty dull compared to a fully reconstructed skeleton. But many of us yearn for a window into ancient worlds, to actually see how long-extinct creatures looked, lived, and behaved. Paleontology lets us crack open that window; using fossilized remains, scientists glean information about growth rates, diet, diseases, and where species roamed. But there’s a lesser-known branch of paleontology that fully opens the window by exploring what the extinct animals actually did.

Enlarge / This is the rendering China's Dongfang Space released of its proposed rocket. It seems to be Kerbal-approved. (credit: Dongfang Space)

Welcome to Edition 4.02 of the Rocket Report! This week there's news about the space race between two rocket billionaires, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, and still more news about Branson's other space company. Thanks for reading and contributing.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Bezos going to space, but will Branson beat him? Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said on Monday he would fly on the first human spaceflight of his company's New Shepard spacecraft. This mission will launch from Blue Origin's spaceport in West Texas on July 20, which is the anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969. With this timeline, Bezos seemed almost certain to get to orbit before his suborbital, space-tourism rival Sir Richard Branson, whose flight was scheduled for later this summer.

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  With Android 12 Beta 2, Google's color-changing UI is live, so we took a trip around the rainbow. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Android 12 Beta 2 came out this week, and with it, a lot of features we've only been able to see screenshots of now actually work. This includes Android's ambitious color-changing UI codenamed "Monet," and even though this is only a beta, after some hands-on time, it feels like Android 12's chameleon-like UI already lives up to the hype.

Monet—or "Material You," as Google now wants us to call it—effortlessly recolors your phone UI with a matching theme based on your wallpaper. Pick a wallpaper that is primarily blue and Android 12 will change the buttons, sliders, clock, notifications, and settings background to matching shades. This arrangement sounds like something that can't possibly work outside of an onstage tech demo, but the code is out now, and it really works. I've spent the last day maliciously trying to break it, and Android 12 reliably turns in beautiful color schemes without any contrast issues.

Google has been working on wallpaper-defined color schemes for some time, starting in Android 5.0 Lollipop and the "Palette" API back in 2014. Monet represents a second-generation swing at the idea, and while Android 5's Palette API was barely used, Google now feels confident enough with the idea to use it basically everywhere. Basically, every piece of the Android 12 system UI other than the permanently black Quick Settings background is subject to the systemwide color coordinator.