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New waterproof, tear-resistant “paper” is made by binding calcium carbonate powder with plastic.Karst’s aggressive marketing rhetoric belies that the “paper” is not mainstream recyclable, where traditional paper is made from 64 percent recycled materials from jump street.Beware of “green capitalism” rhetoric that makes recycling seem simple and foolproof—it isn’t.CNET reports that so-called calcium carbonate paper isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Karst’s website says, “We could kill trees too. But why should we have to?...

Media Platforms Design TeamRace to Witch Mountain Two-Disc Extended Edition (2009)Media Platforms Design TeamDwayne Johnson may have left “The Rock” behind him, but the ex-wrestler continues to deliver his easy-going, onscreen charisma to both action and comedy films alike. Director Andy Fickman (The Game Plan) sets out to create a new chapter in Disney’s classic Witch Mountain franchise rather than an outright remake. Fickman took key elements from the 1975 film, Escape to Witch Mountain, but completely did away with the original’s mystery opting for pure action instead....

On the next resupply mission to the International Space Station, the Space X Dragon will be bringing coffee, a robot, and a set of rodent passengers to help scientists understand biology in space. The laboratory mice will help researchers study how zero-gravity affects biological processes like circadian rhythms and microbiomes. “Because a trip to Mars and back is expected to take several years, we need to determine how the gut’s microbiota might be altered in zero gravity over long timescales,” said Fred Turek, director of Northwestern’s Center for Sleep and Circadian BiologyThe space mice team consists of 10 identical sibling from two different mice families....

Two miles below the waves off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, a team of geochemists in a subsea vehicle accidentally discovered hundreds of strange, beautiful purple octopus incubating their eggs. Deep sea biologists were stunned. “When I first saw the photos, I thought, ‘They shouldn’t be there! Not that deep and not that many of them!’” said Janet Voight, a zoologist at the Field Museum in Chicago.Deep-sea octopuses usually live in far colder temperatures....

A Facebook event urging attendees to “Storm Area 51” on September 20 started as a joke, then became a national phenomenon, swelling to 2 million RSVPs.The prank quickly garnered the attention of both the U.S. military and the rural communities that live near Area 51 in rural Nevada.The event’s founder has disassociated himself with the event, out of fear that logistics will overwhelm whoever shows up in the desert next week....

Pieces of art like statues or paintings are fairly simple to preserve and display: Make sure they don’t physically deteriorate and place them in a room. Technological art, with its myriad variables, becomes much more complex. How much more? This 7,000-word report on how best to put a GIF in a museum gives a fascinating peek into the monumental challenge. Related StoryThe GIF Is Dead. Long Live the GIF.Commissioned by the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, the dizzingly in-depth report by Small Data Industries concerns itself in fairly equal part with the extremely nitty-gritty details of how the GIF works and how it came to be, and the specific challenges of displaying GIFs authentically in an exhibit....

It’s never been less worth it to upgrade to a new iPhone—or any brand new flagship phone, really—because we’re increasingly paying more for gadgets that don’t fix the problems that phones actually have. Maybe that’s why one of the rumors circulating ahead of this fall’s inevitable revamp isn’t even about the phone: it’s about the charger it comes with, one that could make charging faster. Rumors started on the Chinese social network Weibo that the next generation of iPhones will come with a new 18W, USB-C charger packed in, something much more in line with the kinds of chargers that currently come with most Android phones and capable of delivering more juice than the 5W chargers Apple’s been using for years....

Naomi Zettl and Andreas Kunert’s rock walls are more than just stacks of stones. Each one is twisting work of art. Inspired by nature, these walls are at once natural and unnatural. And, of course, very pretty. Media Platforms Design TeamThese are the work of Ancient Art of Stone, a company run by Zettl and Kunert. The pieces they construct are inspired by simple, natural shapes translated into the art of stonemasonry....

Media Platforms Design Team Illustration of the stellar merger. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild. If the universe were a food, it’d be a bag of microwave popcorn–a violent mess of heat and explosions in every direction. But it’s rare when astronomers spy a burst unlike any other before it. Yesterday a team of researchers led by Nial Tanvir of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom claims they’ve identified a new kind of pop out there in the cosmos: the kilonova....

The tricky thing with climate change is that it’s a process measured in decades, so unless you’re looking at big-picture data, it can be hard to notice until it’s too late. But if you take every country’s meteorological data, stretched across an entire century, and crunch it down into 30 seconds—things become a bit more clear.That’s what Finnish researcher Antti Lipponen did, and the results show the reported 2 percent temperature rise splashed across the globe....

Media Platforms Design TeamNASA Orion test launch.President Barack Obama’s new budget released this week sets aside $18 billion for NASA. How much of that proposal becomes reality depends on negotiations with a hostile Congress, but here’s what that big number would mean if Obama gets his way.First, and perhaps most excitingly, is Europa, the moon of Jupiter that may hide an ocean of liquid water beneath its surface. The President’s budget includes a full mission to this moon of Jupiter under the $5....

Media Platforms Design TeamWith cool weather on the way, a devoted group of innovators is working to find a better way to heat a home.By the end of summer, inventors from around the world will enter their best heating designs in the Wood Stove Design Challenge, a competition led by the Alliance for Green Heat and several partners, including Popular Mechanics. The challenge seeks to find an innovative next-generation wood stove to heat the typical middle-class American home in an affordable, consumer- and environmentally friendly way....

Each January, the technology industry convenes for the Consumer Electronics Show–the Super Bowl of gadgets, and a forum for the biggest names in tech to show off their latest and greatest inventions. Indeed, if a game-changing gadget is going to come out sometime this year, chances are it will make its debut somewhere in the sprawling beast of a convention that is CES in Las Vegas. After all, this is where the public got its first glimpse of the VCR (1970)....

Thanks to some light-bending optics, scientists have been experiencing a touch of Groundhog Day when they look out at the cosmos. The same supernova has been showing up over and over.Located more than 9 billion light years away, the supernova Refsdal would be too faint to see but for the influence of four galaxies called the Einstein’s cross, which distort the space around them enough to create gravitational lensing. When astronomers spotted it on November 11, 2014, they thought they’d seen it before....

The iPhone X is beautiful, no doubt. It’s also expensive as all get-out, and the Samsung Galaxy S9 is shaping up to be the same. We’re finally reaching the platonic ideal of a smartphone: a big, slick slab of screen that looks pretty, costs a fortune, has a good camera, and runs all the apps. Cool, good, great. Also boring! Extremely, savagely, stultifyingly boring.Thank goodness for this year’s crop of weirdos coming out of the woodwork....

There may be no more enduring image of American spaceflight than a heroic astronaut boarding a U.S. spacecraft. Images from the Apollo era of spacesuit-clad flyboys striding down sterile hallways have become iconic—and, in the hands of Hollywood, even mythological. Now this scene is on the verge of happening again.Today, workers began final installation on a crew access arm to the Fixed Service Structure at Launch Complex 39A, a crucial milestone in the nation’s effort to resume American-based human spaceflight....

To a human, a freshly manicured grass lawn is a pleasant place to have a picnic, or a nice feature in front of a home. The American Dream prominently features green grass alongside white picket fences as the goal of every working American. But for bees, a manicured lawn is a hellish wasteland filled with zero food or hope. So it’s not surprising that bees tend to avoid them.New research published in the journal Biological Conservation reveals just how much bees hate freshly cut grass: Researchers found that mowing a lawn once every two weeks instead of every week raises the number of bees by 30 percent....

You never know when inspiration will strike. For Chicago-based professional photographer Freddy Fabris, it happened when he stumbled into an auto repair shop while helping his friend get his car fixed.“Because of my painting background I’ve always wanted to re-create classic masterpieces, but I knew that in order to create something that would create a new dialogue on an old subject, there had to be a twist,” Fabris says. “How could we tell these stories in a new context?...

On Thursday, two Congressional Democrats, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, unveiled a sweeping “Green New Deal” initiative to fight climate change and revitalize the economy. As part of that initiative, the Green New Deal calls for the entire country to be powered by renewable energy. While solar and wind energy are prominently featured, one power source is deliberately left out: nuclear.That’s absolutely the right call....

There’s an unwritten part of the history of the universe, somewhere between the Big Bang and the oldest galaxies Hubble has ever spotted. It’s the time when the first stars died, giving way to the first galaxies and matter as we know it today. Scientists call this period the Epoch of Reionization, and various teams are competing to find evidence of these first galaxies that formed during the missing time period....