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Brew Dr. Kombucha, the kombucha brand of Townshend’s Tea Company of Portland, Oregon, uses a unique method to lower the fermented tea drink from its natural 1 to 3 percent ABV to the below 0.5 percent legal limit for nonalcoholic beverages. Then it uses the by-products to help make gasoline (and other stuff). Here’s the most interesting beverage production process in the country:Step 1: The tea is steeped with sugar, then strained through a 500-micron filter to remove tea leaves, producing sweet tea....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe human eye is capable of capturing and processing a broad swath of light levels at any given moment. This allows us to look out on a world filled with bright spots and shadows, and to see an extraordinary amount of detail in both at the same time. Compared to our eyes’ hoover-like ability to suck up light, most cameras can only capture a narrow range of luminance....

The most important thing you can do to find your lost phone happens long before you lose it. You need to go into Settings, tap your Apple ID at the top, tap iCloud, tap Find My iPhone, then make sure Find My iPhone is turned on. If it’s not, then there’s nothing your phone can do to help you find it. We’re sorry for your loss. Instead of reading this story, you might want to start deciding which new iPhone is for you....

You’ve heard the story ad nauseam by now: 2016 was the year of the hacked election. Russia inundated social media platforms with a barrage of fake news that led to the ongoing Mueller probe into how much Vladimir Putin and company interfered in the election. Flash forward two years and the state of American election security has seen improvements, while social media platforms talk a big game about clamping down on bots and fake accounts....

A lot happened between these two pictures. On the left is the “first light” of the Kepler Space Telescope. Dated April 8, 2009, it represents NASA’s initial image from the planet-hunting telescope. Now, nearly a decade later, the agency has released Kepler’s parting gift: its “last light” image, as seen on the right. It was taken on September 25, 2018, just before mission’s end. The pictures themselves don’t say much. They represent Kepler’s field of view, the parts of the sky it surveyed during a decade of uncovering planets and solar systems far beyond our own....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: NASA/JPL)NASA isn’t just busy discovering new planets—it’s also been making these Works Progress Administration-style travel posters for some of the potentially habitable exoplanets in our nearby galactic neighborhood. And frankly, they’re gorgeous. The posters reflect the realities of the worlds. For instance, HD 40307g—a planet discovered in 2008 and lies a mere 42 light years away—is either a super-Earth or a mini-Neptune, and it’s higher gravity is reflected in the image....

NASA has loaded its Space Launch System (SLS) core stage rocket onto the Pegasus Barge. The barge will ferry it from the Agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. During the space shuttle era, the barge was responsible for carrying the spacecraft. To move a big rocket, you need an even bigger barge. NASA’s premier rocket-mover, the Pegasus Barge, is up to the task....

Media Platforms Design TeamThis week six astronauts aboard space shuttle Endeavour are knocking its last mission to the International Space Station (ISS) out of the park. In July, Atlantis’s final flight will bring down the curtain on NASA’s 30-year shuttle program. However, when Atlantis’s crew calls “wheels stop, Houston!” for the final time, many Americans will be startled to find that the nation has no replacement rocket that can launch astronauts to the ISS, 220 miles up....

View full post on InstagramSweden is renowned for being one of the happiest places to live in the world, and perhaps it’s because residents know how to make the best out of a bad situation. Case in point: A subway station flooded, so Swedes turned it into a swimming pool.According to Business Insider, heavy rains caused an underground train station in Uppsala to become inundated with knee-high water. Instead of complaining about the unexpected transit delays (although some did), several people decided to strip down to their boxers or shorts and go for a dip....

It’s not every day that NASA invokes Marvel Comics to describe a planetary science phenomena, but it’s not every day that you find a place whose ocean ripped its surface apart. Ever since New Horizons flew by Pluto last summer, we’ve known about a 1,100 mile formation on the surface of Charon known (for now) as Serenity Chasma. Considering Charon’s diameter of 1,440 miles, that’s essentially a Grand Canyon running across the surface of the moon....

Media Platforms Design TeamMORE RAT ROD NEWS:• PLUS: Is Rust the New Red for the Rat Rod Revolution? CHELSEA, Mich.— As a chariot to meet my maker, I could do a lot worse than Bill Mikkelson’s rat rod. Mikkelson’s a pleasant, mild-mannered, 48-year-old machinist. But this guy has a dark side. He’s crafted a vehicle that looks so sinister, so tough and so lethal Ralph Nader would almost certainly spontaneously combust if he caught a glimpse of it....

Media Platforms Design TeamLast week, SpaceX head Elon Musk unveiled with great fanfare the latest incarnation of its Dragon spacecraft, designed to carry up to seven astronauts into Earth orbit. The most radical feature of the new and improved : its rocket-powered landing system. SpaceX engineers hope to use four pairs of SuperDraco liquid-propellant engines for a helicopter-like landing. Astronauts could make a pinpoint touchdown on dry land, avoiding dangerous ocean landings and eliminating the need for a naval rescue armada....

In a parking lot in New Jersey today, I drove a car straight into the tail end of another vehicle at 25 mph, clenched my teeth and waited for my vehicle to stop itself. I was testing out a prototype of General Motors’ Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications system, which aims to use wireless data transmission to improve vehicle safety.The V2V system sends out speed, GPS location and braking info at a 300-yd. maximum range radius from the vehicle—all over a Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) 5....

The U.S. Navy is calling on industry to present ideas for its Large Unmanned Surface Vehicle (LUSV) ship. The Navy wants ten LUSV ships in five years. The ships would function as scouts for the main battle fleet, carrying sophisticated radar and sonars or floating magazines packing extra anti-air and cruise missiles. Above all, the ships will do what proponents call the “3D work”: dull, dirty, and dangerous work. LUSV will build upon the Navy’s experience with Sea Hunter, an unmanned ship that was recently the first to sail from the mainland to Hawaii....

Media Platforms Design TeamHemnet, the Swedish real estate site, has teamed with Swedish architects Tham & Videgård to design, you guessed it, the perfect Swedish home. The design, however, isn’t the result of a brainstorming session between the two groups. It came from everybody. Hemnet came up with the living space dimensions by mining data from its users—seeing what kind of floor plan, what number of rooms, and what size of kitchen they were searching for....

Usually animal preservation is a passive effort, creating protected zones or taking other measures to protect plants and animals from humans. But scientists and students at the Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts want to help protect coral reefs from an invasive species in a more aggressive fashion: They’re building a robot designed to autonomously hunt for and harvest lionfish threatening coral reefs.Lionfish have threatened coral reefs off American and Caribbean coasts for years....

Since the late 19th century, the official standard for the weight of a single kilogram has been the International Prototype Kilogram (IPK), a small cylinder of platinum and iridium that is sometimes called “Le Grand K” and always kept locked in a vault outside Paris. There are copies of the IPK, but metrologists (measurement-y type scientists) have recently been seeking standards more stable than vulnerable, pathetic physical objects.Now, as Nature reports, there is finally a solution to the dilemma of physical matter’s inevitable deterioration, at least as it pertains to Le Grand K....

You know those trials for people suffering from sleep apnea? The ones where they hook up oodles of wonky sensors connected to wires that hang all over your face, making you look like you’re caught in a spider web?Or how about clinical stress tests? Or even just running with your Fitbit on your wrist to track your heart rate and overall health?What if in both of these scenarios you could ditch the hardware for something as thin as a Band-Aid?...

Google officially announced that it has become the first to achieve quantum supremacy. The company tasked its 54-qubit quantum computer chip with a complex problem: identifying the outputs of a random number generator.Google’s quantum processor cracked the computation in under four minutes, a feat, Google says, that would take the world’s most powerful supercomputer over 10,000 years to complete. The battle to be the first to achieve quantum supremacy is over, and Google apparently stands victorious....

Nobody wants to be the person who has to be told they’ve got food stuck in their teeth. So imagine how it feels to be this Hawaiian monk seal, who managed to get an entire eel stuck in its nose. That seal is real mortified.The Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program, which is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, spotted this oddity. The program spends its time observing monk seals on the northern Hawaiian islands, putting them in the perfect position to observe this awkward young seal who can’t eat eels properly....