For a terrestrial civilization, we sure have made a whole bunch of space trash, including approximately “22,000 objects larger than the size of a softball,” and a bunch smaller than that, most of which come from old satellites (can we start a cosmic recycling program for these?) If you’ve seen Gravity you know how dangerous space trash can be, it can also essentially multiply as it continues colliding. The problem is that it’s not clear whose responsibility it is to clean this mess up, given that waste collection and disposal services don’t exactly make it out that far. It’s also dangerous to collect this trash, as objects can move quick and crazy in space. Researchers at MIT have now developed an algorithm to help crews anticipate the movement of space junk so they can more easily snatch it up.

The technique was recently tested at the ISS where astronauts used SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellite) satellites, which are devices for testing various technologies in zero gravity. The SPHERES are pretty ingenious—they behave like satellites, so they’re the perfect proving ground, and they’re also small enough to actually be tested inside the ISS, which is what they did here. Astronauts equipped a SPHERE with a couple of linked cameras that filmed another satellite that was spinning around in the air.

Last year’s report by the International Panel for Climate Change
was so dire that it caused meteorologist Eric Holthaus to burst into tears. Anyone who has read this report, or any of the myriad scientific findings suggesting that humans keep digging themselves, and the planet, into a deeper and deeper hole, can probably relate to what Holthaus was feeling. Realizing that planes are one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions, Holthaus Tweeted again a couple minutes later:

I realized, just now: This has to be the last flight I ever take. I'm committing right now to stop flying. It's not worth the climate.

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) September 27, 2013

Everyone knows pollution is a major problem, both in the air and the water. Scientists such as Dean Kamen, who brought his water purification system on the Colbert Report, have been working on solutions, but some of the more innovative approaches come from non-scientists, such as the three entrepreneurs who take trash collected in Chilean waters and turn it into skateboards.

The three founders of Bureo are skateboarding and surfing aficionados who were concerned about the pollution of the world’s oceans. The seeds of the company took root when they learned that about 10% of the plastic pollution in the oceans is discarded fishing gear, largely made of plastic. At some point, they had an “aha” moment and realized that the surfboards and skateboards they were using could be made out of that plastic.

Humans don’t just litter on planet Earth — our waste has made it all the way to space. But especially after seeing Gravity, it’s difficult to imagine any astronauts wanting to mess with all the space junk out there. So JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, has come up with a solution: a big ol’ magnetic net to round up all our space trash.

There’s far more space junk out there than we could imagine — hundreds of thousands of chunks from our various satellites and other spacecraft are, just as they do in Gravity, orbiting the planet at great speeds. A report released a couple weeks ago by the Congressional Research Service estimates that “roughly 22,000 objects larger than the size of a softball and hundreds of thousands of smaller fragments” litter Earth’s orbit, and that this debris “potentially threatens U.S. national security interests in space, both governmental (military, intelligence, and civil) and commercial.” Even a small object, about 10 centimeters wide,m could destroy a satellite. In 2007, China launched an anti-satellite test — a missile that blew apart one of their old weather satellites and generated a large percentage of the debris mentioned in the earlier figure. Just a couple of years later, a U.S. commercial satellite ran into an old Russian satellite, generating even more debris. There’s so much space trash out there that experts worry that it could cause serious collisions every 5-9 years. Astrophysicist Donald Kessler was worried about this back in the 1970s — the Kessler syndrome is an ongoing process of collisions generating ever more space debris.

Office-sized garbage cans never seem to be big enough. Maybe you just generate an inordinate amount of refuse, but they always overflow. Maybe what you really need is a trash receptacle that harnesses the power of Doctor Who’s TARDIS.

There’s a lot of craziness going down on The Walking Dead right now as the survivors do their best to settle into their new digs and get comfortable, which is not always an easy task considering damn near everyone and everything they’ve encountered over the previous five seasons has tried to kill them in one way or another. But you can forget all about that for the moment, as the long gestating spinoff, maybe called Cobalt maybe called Fear the Walking Dead, has been picked up for multiple seasons and we now have our first look at the upcoming series.

Deadline reports that AMC has given the go ahead for two seasons of the new series, which marks the second consecutive time that they’ve doled out multi-season commitments to shows that have not even aired yet. Recently, they pulled the same maneuver with Breaking Bad offshoot Better Call Saul, and this latest makes sense by the same logic: both are connected to massively popular shows, so why the hell wouldn’t you want to capitalize on that momentum?