An extremely rare lunar event on the night of Jan. 4, 1912. May have set in motion history’s most infamous iceberg: the one that, three and a half months later, would collide with the Titanic, plunging the ship along with 1,500 passengers and crew into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. That’s the argument [...]

City-slickers: Have you ever worried that, at any moment, you could be struck dead by a penny flung off the roof of a nearby skyscraper? You can rest easy — on that score, at least. In fact, it’s extremely difficult to turn a penny into a lethal weapon, and hurling it over the barricades at [...]

Fires can’t burn in the oxygen-free vacuum of space, but guns can shoot. Modern ammunition contains its own oxidizer, a chemical that will trigger the explosion of gunpowder, and thus the firing of a bullet, wherever you are in the universe. No atmospheric oxygen required. The only difference between pulling the trigger on Earth and in space [...]

The fissure in the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf marks the beginning stages of the birth of a 350-square-mile (900 square kilometers) iceberg, part of a natural process known as calving. The image was snapped on Nov. 13, 2011, when the rift was roughly 19 miles (30 km) long, 260 feet (80 meters) wide for [...]

Beware: It may be the first Friday the 13th of the year, but it won’t be the last. The superstitiously unlucky day is set to creep up two more times in 2012, so if you suffer from friggatriskaidekaphobia (that’s fear of Friday the 13th), maybe it’s best to stay indoors and rent a couple of [...]

To promote the re-release of The Phantom Menace in 3D, French fast food chain Quick is making a Darth Vader Burger complete with a black bun. A BLACK BUN. On a burger! There’s also a Jedi Burger, but whoever wants the snoozefest of a regular bun when the other option is way more revoltingly appealing? [...]

Nabokov once described the region where I’m from in the Midwest as the three states beginning with “I.” My adopted home state, Missouri, is widely regarded as a “fly-over state.” And if you’re erudite New York Times columnist, David Carr, the only waltz we know is the “dance of the low-sloping foreheads.” But I’ve got [...]

Astrophotographer Bill Snyder captured the Dumbbell Nebula – a cloud of star debris which offers a vision of the death throes of our own solar system. ‘All the expanding gas and dust in this image was inside that star,’ says Snyder. When sun-like stars die they ‘puff’ out their outer layers of gas, which form [...]