beer

This past Tuesday night, Solar One, a green energy arts and education center in New York, hosted their second “Party for a Solar Powered New York” at Southpaw bar in Brooklyn.

As any brewer will tell you, the yeast used to make beer tends to bunch up during fermentation. However, despite thousands of years of brewing and decades of genetic research on yeast, no one was able to explain why yeast stuck together. Now, not only has the gene behind the clumping been discovered, but that gene also offers an interesting look at how life may have become multicellular, and provides a new example of an important evolutionary theory.

Taking beer-making to a whole new sphere, Japan's famous Sapporo Holdings Ltd. plans to launch a beer in November that's literally from out of this world. The brewery will collaborate with scientists at the Okayama University in Japan to concoct this unearthly beverage from a third generation of barley grains that spent five months on the International Space Station in 2006.

The only thing better than beer is more beer. And the only thing better than more beer is more beer you make yourself—it saves you a trip to the store. Thus, the NanoBrewMaster—an all-in-one, computer-controlled brewing system that takes your beer from wort boil to frosty pour. It’s the creation of PopSci staff photographer and resident crazy-project-builder John Carnett, who dreamt and built a first iteration of the device that we covered in the magazine last year.