Half of the fun of the holidays is ripping into presents from family and friends or watching someone else do it . We might feel just a twinge or two of guilt as we crumple shreds of once-pristine paper waste into a trash bag and toss it to the curb for garbage collection, but what the hell, you’re on much-needed vacation and you left all of your cares at the office. Wrong. The facts: In 2011, Great Britain alone racked up 227, 000 miles of wasted paper after the holiday season. (That’s enough paper to wrap the world nine times over around the equator.) And according to a study done by Stanford, if every American wrapped three presents in reused materials, the saved paper would cover 45, 000 football fields. The upshot of the guilt trip is that it leads to solutions like wrapping your gifts in the comics section and recycle it when the present party is done, or, say, reusable packaging . UK-based agency BEAF does the DIYers one better with Eden Paper, wrapping paper for the rest of us that you can plant once you’re finished tearing into those gifts. It’s simple: By planting the used paper in some soil and watering it like a regular potted plant, you’ll see sprouts in no time. As with Democratech’s sprouting pencil and plantable OAT Shoes , the gift wrap is produced with the seeds embedded right into the paper. The brand is currently offering the paper in five flavors—chili peppers, onions, carrots, tomatoes and broccoli—but looks to include various flowers and herbs in the future. The gift wrap looks good, too—as good as it tastes, I’m sure. Design-wise, it’s a much-needed upgrade from a lot of the holiday wrap you see around the time of year. There’s only so much you can take when it comes to iridescent snowflakes and glittery ornaments. (more…)
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Eden’s (Plantable) Paper Takes the Cake When it Comes to Holiday Gift Wrapping Must-Haves
Something very strange happened in the R&D lab of a UK-based electronics engineering company. A research team at Roke Manor Research was working on text-based radio frequency systems when a team member suddenly detected a signal—coming from a random bag of components off to the side. A small movement had apparently turned mechanical energy into electrical energy within the bag. After figuring out how this phenomena occurred, a Roke team subsequently harnessed it and created a new tiny tracking device. Their invention works over a greater distance than most existing tags, and here’s the killer quality that makes it really different from nearly all tracking devices: It works without batteries. The device is called Agitate and it’s a self-charging miniature device, no larger than a quarter. The agitate tag’s signal “can be tracked through walls and up to 20 kilometres in built-up areas, ” writes the company, “with an estimated range of 200 kilometres in free space.” So how does it work? Basically Agitate is made of two plates, one is metal and the other a charged material. When either of the two plates are moved, even just slightly, mechanical energy is turned into electrical and is used to transmit a radio pulse. The signal only lasts a few seconds but is more powerful than a cell phone. And it’s very precise—the shorter the radio pulse, the more precise the signal to a specific location. (more…) 
In James Cameron’s Avatar , the lush moon known as Pandora is covered in a “neural network” of roots, enabling the plants to communicate with each other—the interplant, if you will. But if Pandora’s ecology is anything like Earth’s, Cameron has got it wrong. Plants on Earth don’t communicate via root-to-root connections: They communicate through the soil, if a University of Aberdeen study is to be believed. The study, led by researcher Dr. David Johnson , found that plants could communicate with nearby plants using soil fungus as the messenger. The experiment which suggests this was following up the discovery, made in 2010 by a Chinese team, that when a tomato plant gets infected with leaf blight, nearby plants start activating genes that help ward the infection off–even if all airflow between the plants in question has been eliminated. The researchers who conducted this study knew that soil fungi whose hyphae are symbiotic with tomatoes (providing them with minerals in exchange for food) also form a network connecting one plant to another. They speculated, though they could not prove, that molecules signalling danger were passing through this fungal network. While plants don’t have much to “LOL” and “WTF” each other about, Dr. Johnson looked at the Chinese study’s “danger” warnings and set up a similar experiment to see if they’d warn each other of other kinds of trouble. Broad-bean plants are often feasted on by aphids, and to defend themselves, the plants then release a chemical that attracts wasps, who come around and deliver smackdowns on the aphids. Johnson set up ways to isolate potential methods for the plants to “contact” each other (i.e., through some unknown airborne means) and discovered that, yep, when one plant got attacked by aphids, it sent out signals to nearby plants using the local soil fungus. With the message received, the plant’s neighbors would also start releasing the wasp-attracting chemicals. This is pretty mind-blowing, and doubters who need to read more specifics on the study can click here . But what me and every city dweller has got to be thinking is: Can AT&T tap into this network, so we can finally get a cell signal out in the countryside? “I think the mushrooms are capping our download speeds.” Via The Economist (more…) 
If there’s one thing we all hate, it’s losing a yacht race. Owning a yacht and taking the time to think up a really clever name for it, only to become the laughingstock of the marina because it’s too slow, is a feeling few of us enjoy. That’s why when my next paycheck comes in, I’m going to pick one of these Adastra superyachts up. The trimaran design keeps most of the boat out of the water, allowing for swift speed with less fuel consumption; as soon as I’m skipper, I’ll ensure my old yacht-racing nemesis, Blake Chambers, will regretta his next Regatta. Every time I turn these lights on, I whisper to myself: “Boo-yah” (more…) 
While Budweiser’s new bowtie-shaped beer can is a couple of weeks away from launch, a series of smaller breweries have already launched another new type of can: One with a ” 360 Lid ” that peels completely away, allowing tipplers to drink brew through a circular, drinking-glass-like aperture. Here at the Core77 offices we rarely drink beer out of cans. (That’s not snobbery; unlike bottles, cans cannot be broken against desks and wielded as weapons during editorial squabbles that devolve into melees.) But the few times we have, we’ve never had a problem getting beer to pour from the tab-sized opening into our gulping mouths. So why the new can? Pennsylvania-based licenser Sly Fox Brewing Company insists a circular opening “allows the full flavor and aroma of the beer to hit the drinker’s senses.” And yes, the drinking rim is rounded over, so you don’t cut your lips with each swig. (more…) 