Dan Nosowitz

Got a space-heavy lineup for you guys this week, looking forward to the SpaceX launch this weekend: a Soyuz rocket launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, a time-lapsed photo taken from the ISS, a roving space shuttle cafe that looks like an actual space shuttle, and more. Enjoy!

iFixit's beautiful teardowns of products have long been misconstrued as simple gadget porn, when really they're more of an activist call to action: take care of your objects! Repair them, improve them, make them last. iFixit sprung up largely as a response to companies providing wholly inadequate documentation, leaving their customers stranded--and the site's new venture, Dozuki, aims to give those companies a second chance, by taking advantage of what iFixit has made--and in the process, revolutionize the whole idea of the manual.

Living in the Future is a new column about those rare moments, as we go about our daily lives, when we realize that what we're doing is amazing. We have a tendency to assimilate new tech into our lives without giving it much thought, or even without much gratitude, as Louis C.K. reminds us. But every once in awhile, we get that visceral "whoomph" while doing something as mundane as listening to music or playing a video game, and think: "Holy shit. I can't believe this is possible."

I haven't used a computer mouse in three years. That's all because of an app for Mac OS X called Multiclutch. MultiClutch was a game changer for me, a brief but epiphanic look at the future of computing. The idea: you can map keyboard commands to multitouch gestures. This does not sound like a big deal.

It is a big deal.

National Geographic has a new feature up today in which they discuss the new finding of a cave in the midst of an unexplored Mayan megacity--a cave with very particular glyphs on the walls. Those writings include charts to predict lunar cycles and other calendrical workings--including a cyclical Mayan calendar that counts many thousands of years in the future. Which means, um, that stuff about the Maya predicting the end of the world is kind of...factually problematic.

This week, we have beautiful jewel caterpillars that look like they were sculpted out of slick crystal, a massive architectural concept inspired by Twitter, artist's concepts of super Earths and black holes, but really, it's all about this guy. A mere few days old, this baby elephant still lacks a name. We left our suggestions in the gallery, but welcome yours!

Teleportation, sci-fi-y as it sounds, is actually not fictional or even new; two years ago, Chinese physicists broke the then-current record for quantum teleportation by teleporting photons over 10 miles. But a new effort from that same team demolishes that record, beaming the photons over 97 kilometers.

Autodesk, one of the premier 3-D printing companies out there right now--they make AutoCAD, the pioneering software--has a new app out for iPad that aims to make 3-D printing easier. Just snap a bunch of pictures of the object you want to reproduce from different angles, and the app, cleverly named 123D Catch, creates a 3-D rendering automatically.

At Pontificia University Católica in Santiago, Chile, important work is being done. Sick of people repeatedly insisting that corn flakes are delicious when swimming in a bowl of tap water (I guess?), a team of researchers embarked on a remarkably thorough examination of the effects of different liquids--2% milk, skim milk, and water--on breakfast cereal (both corn flakes and quinoa flakes). This is a real study, and we at PopSci spent real money and real time to read it.