The latter project is being worked on at the Imperial College of London, and unlike plastic made from corn it’s looking like these tree and grass-derived molecules actually biodegrade faster and are better for the environment.

In the next five years we should be seeing plastic made from sugar on the market – whether it’s the work of this particular project or someone else, it’ll still benefit everyone. You’d be right in having doubts over how much more expensive it would be to produce, but at least it’d use less energy, and hopefully over time become cheaper the more it’s adopted. [Telegraph]

Turns out the water-based (duh) hydrogels had a great affinity for attaching to glass, so researchers tested out its relationship with something fairly similar: Clay. And lo and behold, it sticks! That gives it a bunch of properties that make it a possible alternative to plastics:

This notably improved mechanical properties over other hydrogels, as it could be molded into shapes that are free-standing and relatively robust and would undergo self-healing when cut. Less than 0.4 percent of it is petroleum-derived, so improved versions may provide an appealing green alternative to polymers. The best aspect, however, may be its simplicity: all you need are three ingredients, a beaker of water, and something to stir with.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether these new hydrogels actually take off as a plastic replacement, but it looks like now they might have a fighting chance. [Ars Technica]

His collection of 30 hauntingly similar shots show what adult birds are feeding to their young: bottlecaps, lighters, spray bottles and, in one case, a piece of what looks to be a headphone.

From the photographer:

On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

It’s gross stuff, to say the least. Hopefully, if you’re buying every USB foot warmer cigarette lighter that Brando releases, you’re disposing of your plastics in a more sustainable way. (But really, in case it wasn’t clear, we don’t expect you to actually buy any of this junk…) [chris jordan via Treehugger]

Last month, an Apple Insider source said the MacBook update would also include a “restructured internal architecture”. It’s now believed that could include Apple’s latest internal battery technology.

Definitely a lot of maybes there, so don’t get too carried away. With that in mind, though, refreshed low(er)-cost MacBooks and iMacs would make sense going into end of year shopping season. And with it all supposed to go down any time between this week and mid-October, it might be worth waiting if you’re in the market for one…just in case. [Apple Insider]

CNET caught up with Doug Freedman, an analyst for AmTech who has been speaking to device manufacturers:

Early production units being built in plastic, with the bottom case being plastic, are cracking…So, to get that really thin form factor that they’re after, they’re probably going to have to go with a metal case.

The obvious issue here is that they can’t go with a metal case, or else they’ll almost certainly cease to be “budget” laptops. As Mark noted in his review, the MSI X340—on the high end of this particular category already—suffered from an alarming flimsiness. Switching the case to aluminium would solve this problem; it would also push the laptop’s price even closer to the MacBook Air, effectively eliminating its entire reason for existence.

To be fair, most of the laptops announced in the category haven’t even started shipping yet, and problems like this could conceivably be conquered with some clever industrial design wizardry. Sometimes, though, there’s a reason a particular product niche—especially an obvious one like this—hasn’t been cracked before. [CNET]

Simply put, the Teflon-coated back just feels and looks a lot better than the iPhone’s—now crappy looking, I admit—plastic back. The Hero’s polytetrafluoroethylene—the technical name for DuPont’s Teflon—coating feels perfect in your hand. It doesn’t appear to get any skin oil at all. No apparent fingerprints, no shining, just a perfect matte finish no matter how much I touched it. It feels and looks like a white thermal tile out of NASA’s shuttle.

The iPhone’s plastic finish, on the other side, is a fingerprint magnet that looks as cheap as any Chinese knockoff after holding it for a few seconds. The Hero wins hands down on appearance, even while its front is too complicated for my taste. For a company like Apple—which takes such pride in their design and manufacturing—this is bad. Very bad.

“They are getting so boring”

Once upon a time Apple used to break new ground in the use of plastic materials. Those were the times in which they experimented with the iMacs and PowerMacs. But apart from the unibody manufacturing—which is just a form of aluminium manufacturing, a material that has been used forever in consumer products—their materials innovation is stagnated.

I’m not the only one saying this. About a month ago Matt Buchanan and I asked the top executive of one of the most important industrial design firms in the world about his thoughts on Apple’s design. After seeing Objectified—and watching Dieter Rams saying that Apple is the only consumer electronics company that counts when it comes to industrial design—I was expecting an ode to Jon Ive. Instead, he replied:

They are great, but we all think they are getting so boring. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they got the use of aluminium perfected now… but what happened with the excitement that they used to generate with new materials? We all [him and his colleagues in the industrial design world] expect a lot more from Apple.

He is right. But not because Apple should use new materials for the sake of it. That won’t be right, of course: They should use whatever materials fit the product technical needs. But to me, one of these needs as a consumer is that the product should look good at all times, and not just look good in the box or behind a glass.

The need for new materials

The iPhone has this problem. They have tried to fix part of it with the oleophobic coating on the front part—something that the HTC Hero also has—but the overall effect keeps being the same: Its back still looks cheap until some time.

We were all hoping for a matte back in the iPhone 3GS, but apparently Apple decided not to release for one reason or the other. I don’t know and I don’t care. What I do care about is that, after playing with the Hero, my iPhone feels like crap. And I don’t even like Android.

The USB Cereal Spoon will never get soggy in milk, because it’s completely covered with several layers of glue. Yum!

It works, as you can see in the video, but if I owned one of these I’d rue the day I came home plastered from the bar and tried to eat it. So, yeah, basically every night. I’m a writer, you see.

[Techeblog via Geekologie]

Do we want tens of plastic guitars, skateboards, drums, balance boards and light guns cluttering up our living room space? No, of course not. But ponder these simple questions.

1) Would you rather be pushing buttons in time to music with your Xbox 360 controller, or strumming along with your fake guitar and hitting a drum pad?
2) Would you rather be pushing buttons to make your character do a 720, or actually tilt your body on a skateboard?
3) Would you rather be pushing buttons and tilting a stick to shoot something on the screen, or point a gun at the screen and physically shoot the screen?

It’s simple; most everyone would rather be simulating the act because it gets them closer to the experience of actually playing the game and mimicking what the character is doing on screen. And that’s just the way we’re headed. The first controllers had a joystick and one button, and technology’s progressed along until we’re actually getting 1:1 motion detection.

But where is this all going? The endpoint, in our minds, is something like the Holodeck from Star Trek. A room that, although finite in reality, has the mechanical and optical abilities to simulate just about anything you can program. But we’re a long way from that. What we can do is take steps toward that goal, by simulating the experience with plastic instruments. But there are many steps between here and there, and hopefully the next one won’t cause us to fall down because there’s a plastic guitar in the way.

Boxed milk and juices are a supermarket staple, but one company is now selling boxed water.

Boxed Water Is Better sells water in cartons, ditching the plastic bottles while reducing the overall carbon footprint of packing and distribution by 80%.

20% of the company’s profits are passed along to reforestation (10%) and water relief (10%) while you sip on the sweet hydrogen/oxygen nectar of Minnesota and a few parts per billion of paper pulp.

But while Boxed Water is undoubtedly more sustainable than bottled water, I can’t help but think the product’s absurdity does less to open a new market than close an old one. In other words, Boxed Water is a ridiculous solution to an even more ridiculous problem—that we’d rather buy packaged water than drink it for nearly free out of the tap. [Boxed Water via Cool Hunting and image]