Technology

Texas engineers made a jacket you can drink

No canteen, no filter, no faucet. Just fabric and the air around you.

For more than two billion people, a clean drink of water is anything but a given, thanks to pollution, climate change, and simple population growth. So a team of engineers at the University of Texas at Austin asked a gloriously literal question, which Erik Barnes lays out in full: what if you could just wear your water source? Their prototype jacket does exactly that, pulling drinkable water straight out of the air around you.

The idea borrows from the same trick behind fog harvesting, the nets that comb moisture out of the sky. The difference is that those systems sit in one place, while this one walks around with you, quietly turning thin air into something you can sip while it doubles as an actual jacket. How the fabric manages that involves sunlight, condensation, and a material you would not see coming.

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Culture

"I married my best friend" is rarer than the wedding toasts suggest

A new friendship study did the wedding-toast math.

You've heard it at every wedding: someone lifts a glass and swears they married their best friend. It's the romantic gold standard, the thing you're supposed to feel. So it may sting to learn that a Colorado State University friendship study found only about 14% of people actually hand their romantic partner the "best friend" title. If your spouse isn't yours, you're not the exception. You're the rule.

As Erik Barnes reports, researchers asked 940 people in relationships, ages 18 to 85, to list everyone they counted as a friend, with no hint about whether partners belonged. Only about a third put their partner on the list at all. The rest weren't necessarily headed for a breakup. They'd just quietly filed the person they fell hardest for into a different drawer. What earns someone the "best friend" label is messier than a toast lets on.

And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we developed a story about the resurgence of film camera photography.

How do GOOD readers feel about the venerable old tech? About 40% of you are here for the analog goodness, with almost another 30% willing to take their chances. I’m among the believers; I have a pile of dark-room stuff in a closet. I really should dust it all off and develop these rolls…

• Grain, light leaks, soul. Digital has none of it. (40.0%)

• Sorry, celluloid. The best camera is the one already in my pocket. (15.0%)

• I'm here for the suspense, and the 9 of 24 that actually come out. (27.5%)

• A pricey retro gimmick. Digital won years ago. (17.5%)

World

When a motorcyclist got pinned, the nearest car lot emptied out

A Brisbane commute went very wrong, very fast.

Tyler Wiebe was riding to work through Brisbane when a car veered the wrong way, clipped another vehicle, and sent the wreckage straight into his motorcycle. He was thrown from the bike and dragged beneath a car weighing more than 3,300 pounds, his head and chest pinned flat against the road.

For roughly two minutes, the physics were merciless. The weight was cracking his ribs, collapsing a lung, and stopping his heart from beating. Blood ran from his eyes, nose, and mouth. "Initially it was 'can I get out?' and then it was 'man I am dying, this is it,'" Wiebe said. "[My] wife and two kids are not here, and this is it."

Rescue came from the last place anyone would look for it: the used car dealership across the road. As Erik Barnes reports, the salesmen heard the crash, spotted two motionless legs under the wreck, and came running. Their first attempt to lift the car failed. So they did what the best kind of stranger does, the same instinct that sends teenagers off their bikes for someone they've never met: they went for more hands. How many it finally took, and the gift Wiebe brought them weeks later, is the part worth staying for.

On June 30, 1864, with Union and Confederate armies still hammering at each other across half a continent, Abraham Lincoln signed a quiet two-paragraph bill called the Yosemite Grant Act, handing Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias over to California with one sweeping instruction: hold this land for public use, resort, and recreation, for all time.

It was a wildly strange thing to do in the middle of a war. The idea of a government setting aside scenic land purely because it was beautiful had basically never been tried anywhere. The nudge came from a photographer named Carleton Watkins, whose mammoth glass-plate images of Yosemite had traveled east and made jaws drop in Washington, plus a California senator who reassured colleagues the place was far too remote for farming or logging.

Yosemite itself wouldn't become a full national park until 1890, and Yellowstone grabbed the "first national park" trophy in 1872. But the whole idea was already alive in Lincoln's two paragraphs: land set aside not for kings, not for profit, but for everyone, forever. That notion has since multiplied into more than 60 U.S. national parks, thousands of state parks, and a global preservation movement still going strong. 

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A rotty and a panther grow up together and become best friends. Not, apparently, a fun pitch for a new animated film but a thing that has actually happened.

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