Our galaxy is full of black holes, collapsed stellar corpses just a dozen miles wide. How full? Tough question. After all, they're called black holes for a reason. You can't see them until they're swallowing up the stars around them
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There have been several bodies found near the standing stones we know as Stonehenge. The most recently found, the body of a teen age boy, was found wearing a necklace of amber beads, an uncommon find among bodies this age. Tests on his teeth show t
Sarah Palin was thought to be booed at when she was in the crowd watching her daughter Bristol on Dancing With The Stars. But, as it turned out, she wasn't being booed at. The crowd was actually booing at a scoring choice by the judges, and Palin jus
In 1783, the Laki volcano in Iceland erupted, spitting out three cubic miles of lava. Floods, ash, and fumes wiped out 9,000 people and 80 percent of the livestock. The ensuing starvation killed a quarter of Iceland's population. At
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Whoo-hoo! If the world and bacteria can't kill us, lets just do it ourselves!
Together, the United States and Russia still have almost 19,000 active nuclear warheads. Nuclear war seems unlikely today, but a dozen years ago the demise of
Okay, so this place called Lincolnshire has a big problem of criminals stealing tractors and other farm equipment. So to combat this, they got a john deere 6630 tractor and decked it out with police lights. Their goal is to show the farmers that they
Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, raved that a particle accelerator experiment could set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world.
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Surprisingly, many sober-minded physicists have had the same
Every few hundred thousand years Earth's magnetic field dwindles almost to nothing for perhaps a century, then gradually reappears with the north and south poles flipped. The last such reversal was 780,000 years ago, so we may
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Images of slaughtered elephants and burning rain forests capture people's attention, but the big problem—the overall loss of biodiversity—is not as obvious but highly dangerous.
Billions of years of evolution have produced a world i
Before you've even gotten the keyboard dirty, your home computer is obsolete. Mostly because of incredibly rapid progress in miniaturizing circuits on silicon chips.
Like Mr. Bruns "Shift Happens". Even our own intelligence i
Solar Flares-more scientifically known as coronal mass ejections—are enormous magnetic outbursts on the sun that bombard Earth with a torrent of high-speed subatomic particles. Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field negate the potentially
In the book Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut popularized the idea of "ice-nine," a form of water that is far more stable than the ordinary kind, so it is solid at room temperature. Or ice. Unleash a bit of it, it merges with the all
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If Earth doesn't do us in, our fellow organisms might be up to the task.
Germs and people have always coexisted, but occasionally the balance gets out of whack. The Black Plague killed one European in four during the 14th century; influenza to
Judaism has the Book of Daniel; Christianity has the Book of Revelation; Islam has the coming of the Mahdi; Zoroastrianism has the countdown to the arrival of the third son of Zoroaster.
