We know disposable tech hurts our wallets — but there’s also a significant environmental impact there, too: Many devices that we have come to rely on as a crucial part of daily life are all designed to give out on us 3-4 years after their purchase, making them a drain on our expenses and a contributor to the climate crisis. “Buying gear with batteries sealed inside is kind of like buying a car where you can’t change the tires. We just don’t realize we’re doing it, or how it’s contributing to our climate and sustainability crises,” tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler writes for the Washington Post. The two biggest environmental issues in the gadget space is how they’re manufactured and how we dispose of them, both of which result in significant carbon emissions.

Part of the solution: Shifting to products that have batteries that consumers can change and continue to get use out of the product, Fowler says. However, he warns that this shift is not necessarily a simple one, considering tech companies refuse to come clean with their battery information, with only three big players — Nintendo, VanMoof and Apple — disclosing this information on their websites.

The new excuse to get a tattoo: “I’m keeping track of my vitals.” South Korean scientists are developing a nanotech tattoo ink that serves as a health monitoring device, according to Reuters. A science team at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon have developed a tattoo ink, manufactured from liquid metal and carbon nanotubes, that serves as a bioelectrode. The tattoo, when attached to an ECG device, can provide your heart rate and other vital signs. “In the future, what we hope to do is connect a wireless chip integrated with this ink, so that we can communicate, or we can send signals back and forth between our body to an external device,” said Steve Park, a materials science and engineering professor who leads the project.