Month: April 2022

Enlarge / Fossilized spider from the Aix-en-Provence formation in France seen in hand sample overlain with fluorescent microscopy image of the same fossil. UV illumination causes the fossil to glow brightly, revealing more details about its preservation. (credit: Olcott et al., 2022)

Scientists have long puzzled over the exceptional preservation of certain fossils of Cenozoic-era biota, including plants, fish, amphibians, spiders, and other insects. The secret: The presence of mats comprised of single-celled microalgae (diatoms) created an anaerobic environment for fossilization and chemically reacted with the spiders' organic polymers to turn them into thin carbon-rich films. The process is similar to a common industrial treatment to preserve rubber, according to a recent paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Most fossils are basically mineralized body parts: shells, bones, and teeth. But softer tissues are far more likely to decay than fossilize, including chitinous exoskeletons, skin, and feathers. Soft-tissue organisms tend to be under-represented among fossils, except for unusual deposits (called Fossil-Lagerstätten) that boast rich arrays of such fossils in remarkable preservation.

“Most life doesn’t become a fossil,” said Alison Olcott, a geologist at the University of Kansas. “It's hard to become a fossil. You have to die under very specific circumstances, and one of the easiest ways to become a fossil is to have hard parts like bones, horns, and teeth. So, our record of soft-body life and terrestrial life, like spiders, is spotty—but we have these periods of exceptional preservation when all circumstances were harmonious for preservation to happen.”

Enlarge / Apple's Studio Display. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple's Studio Display got dinged for plenty of things in reviews, including its price and its IPS panel technology. But the most consistent criticism was aimed at its built-in webcam, which fell far short of most standalone desktop webcams—and even the front-facing cameras included with iPhones and iPads.

Apple said back in March that it would release a firmware update to address at least some of the problems, and that update is currently available in beta form starting today.

"This beta update has refinements to the Studio Display camera tuning, including improved noise reduction, contrast, and framing," an Apple spokesperson told Ars.

• 

  Scroll down on a Google Play app listing and you'll soon see this new privacy section. [credit: Google ]

Following in the footsteps of iOS 14, Google is rolling out an app privacy section to the Play Store on Tuesday. When you look up an app on the Play Store, alongside sections like "About this app" and "ratings and reviews," there will be a new section called "Data privacy & security," where developers can explain what data they collect. Google showed off this feature last year, and it will finally start appearing in the Play Store today.

Note that while the section will be appearing for users starting today, it might not be filled out by developers. Google's deadline for developers to provide privacy information is July 20. Even then, all of this privacy information is provided by the developer and is essentially working on the honor system. Here's how Google describes the process to developers:

You alone are responsible for making complete and accurate declarations in your app’s store listing on Google Play. Google Play reviews apps across all policy requirements; however, we cannot make determinations on behalf of the developers of how they handle user data. Only you possess all the information required to complete the Data safety form. When Google becomes aware of a discrepancy between your app behavior and your declaration, we may take appropriate action, including enforcement action.

Once the section is up and running, developers will be expected to list what data they're collecting, why they're collecting it, and who they're sharing it with. The support page features a big list of data types for elements like "location," "personal info," "financial info," "web history," "contacts," and various file types. Developers are expected to list their data security practices, including explaining if data is encrypted in transit and if users can ask for data to be deleted. There's also a spot for "Google Play’s Families Policy" compliance, which is mostly just a bunch of US COPPA and EU GDPR requirements.

Enlarge / Conservation efforts for the shoe included careful reshaping and freeze-drying. (credit: Secrets of the Ice)

Sometime between 200 and 500 CE, someone crossing a high mountain pass in Norway discarded a shoe. More than 1,500 years later, an unusually warm summer melted centuries of accumulated snow and ice, revealing the ancient shoe—and an assortment of other objects left behind by ancient and medieval travelers on the snowy mountain trails. Archaeologists with the Secrets of the Ice project recovered the shoe in 2019, finished conserving it in 2021, and recently published a report about the site and the finds.

The report “is for internal archiving only and [is] not published,” Secrets of the Ice co-director Lars Holger Pilø told Ars in an email. “In addition, it is in Norwegian.”

But Pilø and his colleagues recently shared some highlights via the project’s social media and in a conversation with Ars.

Enlarge / E Ink's Gallery 3 screen technology could make color e-readers less compromised than they have been to date. (credit: E Ink)

E-readers like Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite have great battery life and are easy on the eyes, but they still have one big shortcoming: They're only capable of black-and-white output. The E Ink Corporation, the company behind the screen tech that powers most e-readers, does offer color products, but most of them have suffered from odd color casts, long refresh times, and low pixel density.

That could change with the introduction of Gallery 3, a new color E Ink display technology that promises better color reproduction and dramatically faster page refresh times than its predecessor. The first E Ink Gallery display took two seconds to refresh a page of black-and-white content and 10 seconds to refresh a color page—that's acceptable if you're using it for signage, but it's an eternity if you're trying to read a magazine or graphic novel. Gallery 3 promises refresh times of just 0.5 seconds in its fastest low-quality color mode or 1.5 seconds in its high-quality color mode.

Gallery 3's 300 PPI pixel density is also comparable to current black-and-white e-reader screens, and both text and images will appear visibly sharper than they did on previous-generation 150 PPI screens. Black-and-white content can refresh in just 0.35 seconds, and the screens also support pen input for e-readers that let you mark up PDFs and other documents.