Elements

Reese Witherspoon is a brunet! The Academy Award-winning actress has gone to the dark side and dyed her signature legally blond tresses brown. Witherspoon was spotted in Nashville over the weekend with the new 'do pulled back in a messy bun and sported her signature wispy bangs. She was photographed with husband Jim Toth, toting around their 6-month old son, Tennessee, according to E! News. The actress most notably went for a darker shade as part of her award-winning role in 2005's "Walk the Line," in which she played Johnny Cash love interest June Carter.

Barbie is vacating her pink Malibu mansion and hunting for international digs. Thomas the Tank Engine is being revamped as an even livelier locomotive. Max Steel, the new kid on the block, is marketed as a "modern day tech superhero. " The toy brands, all properties of Mattel Inc., represent an evolution at the El Segundo company. At age 68, the company is incorporating more digital elements into its toys, embracing more Hollywood partnerships, pushing into foreign markets - whatever it takes to keep its status as the world's largest toy maker.

The super-heavy elements 114 and 116 have officially been recognized by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the official arbiter of chemical names, and have been named in honor of the U.S. and Russian institutions where they were jointly discovered. Element 116 has been named livermorium with the symbol Lv in honor of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the nearby city of Livermore. Element 114 has been named flerovium, with the symbol Fl, in honor of the Flerov Laboratory on Nuclear Reactions in Dubna.

Re "Tall order for Watts Towers," April 1 Simon Rodia was a great artist and dreamer who built the wonderfully decorated Watts Towers all by himself. Unfortunately, they are made of relatively flexible steel and rigid and brittle concrete, mortar and tile. The towers will move and deflect as they respond to the weather and earthquake forces, and in so doing, the rigid elements of the cladding will break, unable to physically flex with the steel's movements. Engineers have always struggled with the balance of strength and stiffness.

I would like to thank you for the Nov. 4 "Elements of Tile" (by Barbara Thornburg), which featured my store, Grau. I would like to give credit to my architect, Ajax Daniels of Ajax Associates in Venice, who collaborated with me fully on the design of the store, and to Stephen Granach, who executed the tile work. CLAUDIA GRAU Los Angeles

The title "8 Million Ways to Die" was already taken, so "The Grey" had to settle for "The Grey," named for the plus-size wolves waging war on the desperate human survivors of an Alaskan wilderness plane crash. Tough situation. Frostbite. Wolf bite. Drowning. Falling from great heights. Harsh outcomes abound for man and beast. And yet the film takes some time to let its characters ruminate, by way of dialogue, on their circumstances, which gives "The Grey" a distinctly late 20th century feel.

Astrophysicist Geoffrey Burbidge, who with his wife and two other colleagues determined how elements are synthesized in the nuclear reactors of stars, died Tuesday at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla after a long illness. He was 84. Widely honored for his contributions to astrophysics, cosmology and the study of radio galaxies, Burbidge became notorious in recent years for his refusal to accept the widely held view that the universe originated in a Big Bang, arguing instead that matter is continually created, emerging as quasars ejected from energetic galaxies.

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory said Monday they have created two new elements, Nos. 116 and 118, bringing to three the number created this year. Russian scientists said in January that they had created element No. 114. All three artificial elements are too short-lived to exist in nature. The Berkeley team created 118 by directing a beam of high-energy ions of krypton-86 at a target of lead-208.

A Russian-American team working at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, has created two new super-heavy elements, with atomic numbers 113 and 115. The team produced only four atoms of the short-lived new elements, enough to claim success but not enough for the finding to become official.

Very high levels of lead have been discovered in three distant stars in the Milky Way galaxy by researchers using La Silla Observatory in Chile. The finding supports the long-held view that common stars toward the end of their life produce roughly half of the stable, heavier-than-iron elements in the universe. Lead and other elements are produced when nuclear fusion in a star adds neutrons to the atomic nuclei of lighter elements. Further information: http://www.eso.

MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. - Howard Sheckter was a painfully shy 10-year-old when he found his calling in a Glendora hailstorm. As lightning and thunder crackled all around him, he looked up and felt chunks of ice bounce off his cheeks. The experience ignited an obsession. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this article misspelled Sheckter's name as Schecter. "My mother's telephone bills were huge because I was calling the weather service 10 times a day," said Sheckter, now 62. "One day, my mother called the operator and asked, 'What number is this?

From the nation that brought you "Are You Being Served?" comes "Mr. Selfridge," a loose dramatization of the founding of a British retail institution, the Selfridge & Co. department store, familiarly called Selfridges. Its eight-part run begins Sunday, under the colors of PBS' "Masterpiece. " Starring Jeremy Piven as Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American who brought recreational shopping to Britain, it is neither a miniseries nor a biopic, but a full-on, open-ended TV series - a second season is already slated for 2014 - which, like "The Tudors/The Borgias," takes real people from a real place and time and embroiders their lives with the sort of things you watch television for. There are resemblances to "Mad Men," as well, in that it is a period piece about the business of selling and the dreaminess of buying; and of "Downton Abbey" because it is concerned with social mobility at the end of the Edwardian era and ... big hats.

Hydrogen. Carbon. Oxygen. Nitrogen. Sulfur. Phosphorus. These elements account for more than 96% of the stuff life on Earth is made from - and all six have been found in a rock sample on Mars. NASA scientists said Tuesday that the Curiosity rover discovered these basic building blocks of life in the very first rock it has drilled from beneath the Martian surface - along with signs that the Red Planet was once capable of hosting primitive microbes. "It definitely has all the indications of being a habitable environment at one point in time," Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, said at a news conference in Washington.

Caravaggio is a great subject for music. There are fascinating parallels between the way the artist helped usher in modern painting at the turn of the 17th century and the way his Italian contemporaries Monteverdi and Gesualdo laid the foundations for modern music. In the last few years, Caravaggio, who happened to be a flamboyantly unstable character ever in trouble with the authorities, has also caught the imagination of today's musicians. He's been a subject for opera and ballet.

Since Michelle Obama and her kitten heels first stepped onto the national stage five years ago, the keys to her personal dress code have remained remarkably consistent. Pearls, cardigans and brooches are all components of the first lady's look. Conservative relics of an old world Washington wardrobe? Not the way Obama interprets them, always adding her own twist. Here are a few of her most influential style signatures. - Booth Moore Pearls Obama breathed new life into the most traditional of heirloom accessories by choosing updated interpretations of the classic pearl necklace, which have included the edgy (tangled strands of blue-tone pearls by L.A.-based designer Tom Binns worn with a Marchesa gown to a state dinner in March)

SOUTHPORT, N.C. - This is the kind of touristy fishing village that defines Southern charm. A cute little downtown filled with restaurants, a waterfront park and artsy shops. Late 19th century houses with verandas on streets shaded by towering live oaks. Herons and egrets sharing the Cape Fear River and Intracoastal Waterway with pleasure craft. It's the perfect setting for a Nicholas Sparks story. And on a hot summer day last year, the film version of the prolific author's "Safe Haven" was in production here in the isolated little town where the book is actually set, "which is unheard of," said actor Josh Duhamel, who costars with Julianne Hough in the feature directed by Lasse Hallström and adapted by Gage Lansky and Dana Stevens.

Twenty years after its creation in a Berkeley laboratory, the 106th known element has finally received a name--seaborgium, after Glenn T. Seaborg, the Berkeley Nobel laureate who helped make it and nine other heavy elements. It is the first time an element has been named after a living person. Seaborg, 81, is a former chancellor of UC Berkeley and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (the forerunner of today's Department of Energy) under Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B.

Time is a key element in Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road. " "We know time," the protagonist Dean Moriarty (based on Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady) mutters throughout the book, an invocation and a prayer. That's important for a couple of reasons: It signals the novel's hunger for new experience, for a way out of the conformist pieties of post-World War II America, and also Kerouac's desire to stare down the mortality that he feared. In some sense, this is the key to all his writing, the idea that by mythologizing his life and that of his friends he was somehow placing them all outside of time.

Things aren't what they used to be in the world of "Parental Guidance," not just with the kids but parents too. In this lazy, smugly self-satisfied movie starring and produced by Billy Crystal, the comedian apparently wanted to say a thing or two about modern "helicopter" parenting techniques from the perspective of an old-school, been-there grandparent. Crystal and Bette Midler portray the less-popular "other grandparents" to the three children of their only daughter, played by Marisa Tomei.