Month: February 2022

Enlarge / The new Gmail design. You can see a chat popup in the bottom left. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Gmail's latest redesign seems to have finally started hitting a wide number of accounts over the weekend. The new desktop site changes up the 2018 design by turning the top and side portions of the web app gray, turning the red highlight to blue, and rounding over some of the corners. Oh yeah—it also adds a big, second sidebar to the left side of the screen. The normal Gmail sidebar showing all your mail sections is still there, but now there's a whole additional sidebar that is basically an app switcher for other Google apps. It's weird.

The new colors are fine, but Gmail is theme-able anyway, so the new default design doesn't really matter much. But the new "integrated view" and sidebar will probably cause controversy. You're on Gmail.com to check your email, and now on the side of the screen, there are four new buttons. There's "Mail," which is just Gmail. Then "Chat" and "Spaces," which are both for Google's latest messaging service, Google Chat. Then there's a button for Google Meet, Google's Zoom competitor.

That's pretty much it. A top-to-bottom vertical bar to display four measly buttons (five if you count the returning hamburger button) and then a desolate Siberian wilderness of whitespace. Oh, if you happen to get an incoming Google Chat, you'll see a profile picture pop-up in the abyss that is the bottom of the new sidebar. This is a huge waste of space for buttons that are irrelevant if you visit Gmail to—you know—use Gmail.

Humans have lived aboard the International Space Station for more than two decades. (credit: NASA)

NASA's senior official for human spaceflight operations said Monday that the US space agency continues to operate the International Space Station as usual with its partners, including Russia.

"Our operations are nominal," said Associate Administrator for Space Operations Kathy Lueders. She acknowledged that NASA continues to monitor the situation in Ukraine and work with the US State Department. "We've operated in these kind of situations before, and both sides always operated very professionally and understand at our level the importance of this fantastic mission."

NASA flight controllers and other officials continue to work in Moscow, she said, and US and Russian managers have good communication. At the "working level," at least, there are no signs of trouble. "We, as a team, are operating just like we were operating three weeks ago," she said.

Enlarge / A metal ladle is used to serve takeout Chinese food from a plastic container, Lafayette, California, December 25, 2021. (credit: Getty | Gado)

Medical experts are calling out a rotten batch of news articles that wrongly claimed spoiled leftover Chinese food caused a teen to develop a life-threatening infection within hours, which led to the amputation of both his legs below the knees and parts of all 10 of his fingers.

In reality, the 19-year-old male suffered a rare and extremely severe complication from a blood infection with a bacterium that causes meningococcal disease. The bacterium—known as Neisseria meningitidis—is not foodborne, and its incubation period is longer than just a few hours.

N. meningitidis harmlessly colonize the noses and throats of about 10 percent of people. It spreads through very close contact and directly swapping saliva, such as through coughing, kissing, and living in close quarters, like dormitories. Given the risk in group settings, many colleges and universities require students to get meningococcal vaccines before attending. Still, there has never been a documented case of N. meningitidis spreading via food.

Enlarge / A low-temperature isomerization unit at the Novokuibyshevsk Refinery, a subsidiary of Rosneft Oil Company, in the Russian city of Novokuibyshevsk. (credit: Yegor Aleyev / TASS)

Shell announced today that it would be pulling out of the stalled Nord Stream 2 pipeline and looking to sell its stakes in various oil and gas projects in Russia as President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukrainian grinds on.

The decision to exit the Nord Stream 2 investment comes days after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz effectively killed the project by suspending its certification. The Dutch company split about half the cost of the pipeline with four other European energy companies. Gazprom, the gas company controlled by the Russian government, covered the other half. Shell also owns significant stakes in two other oil and gas projects in Russia.

Together, the moves could cost Gazprom billions of dollars if the company can’t find buyers or has to take a significant write-down. Given international sentiment at the moment, the latter seems more likely. Altogether, the oil and gas projects represent about 5 percent of the company’s annual production, according to the Financial Times.

Enlarge

Cyberspace is feeling the strain of Russia’s deadly invasion of Ukraine: multiple sites tied to the Kremlin and its allies in Belarus have been unavailable to all or at least major parts of the Internet in recent days.

The outages began last week with the defacement of Russian websites and picked up steam over the weekend, following a call from Ukraine’s vice prime minister for the formation of an “IT Army” to target Russian interests.

A call to arms

“There will be tasks for everyone,” Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov wrote. “We continue to fight on the cyber front. The first task is on the channel for cyber specialists.”

Enlarge (credit: Sala et al. 2022)

Early humans suffered frequent head injuries but often lived long enough for those injuries to heal. That's the result of a study that analyzed twenty 350,000-year-old skulls from a cave in Spain. The study also found that recovery wasn't inevitable—several of the individuals in the cave apparently died from violent blows to the head.

Welcome to the Pit of Bones

About 350,000 years ago, deep in a cave network in what is now northern Spain, the remains of at least 29 people somehow ended up at the bottom of a 13-meter-deep shaft. Paleoanthropologists have unearthed thousands of broken pieces of bone, which add up to the partial skeletons of at least 29 members of a hominin species called Homo heidelbergensis, which may have been a common ancestor of our species and Neanderthals.

The pit, called Sima de los Huesos, contains a mix of ages and genders. Paleoanthropologists are still debating whether the pit was a burial site or just a place where bones washed in with floodwaters.