An Apple Product

The fruity fabric.

A studio in Japan has developed a technology to recycle apple pomace.

The waste that’s generated after apples are pressed to make cider and juice is turned into a see-through fabric that has a reddish hue.

China’s “Wild West”

The Chinese East Coast is where it’s all happening.

The Hu Line is an invisible line that bisects China into two highly uneven zones. The area to the west of it holds 57 percent of the territory, but a mere six percent of the country’s population. The area east of it has 43 percent of the land, but is home to 94 percent of the Chinese people.

The divide is this sharp because of geography. The west has mountains, deserts and plateaus and the east is flat and wet.

The Odd Boat

A close encounter of the third kind?

Sometime in the early months of 1803, a vessel that looked like a cauldron or a rice pot came ashore on the coast of Japan.

Its bottom was forged from some kind of heavy metal. Its top seemed to be made of rosewood and was inset with latticed glass. On the beach, villagers marveled at its advanced engineering.

This object, known as utsuro-bune (Japanese for “hollow ship”), appears in a dozen literary texts of that period.

Was it a UFO?