Ok, maybe there's no ka-boom because there's no sound, but just looking at this video makes me imagine all that water wooshing by as everything begins to shake. Simply stunning. [Physorg]

After two years of studying light output from the star's death, one scientist is proposing that this star might have been the biggest ever known. About 200 times larger than a standard solar mass.

And when huge stars explode, it involves some really cool words. Check out this description:

But in the case of an extremely massive star, while its core is still made of oxygen, it releases photons that are so energetic, they create pairs of electrons and their anti-matter opposites, positrons. When the matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other.

Electrons and positrons? Matter and anti-matter? All fighting to annihilate each other and creating what may be the biggest nuclear explosion EVER? Man that sounds awesome.

I hope I get an FPS-style killcam view of the universe when I die, just so I can see stuff like this go down. [Space.com via Gearlog]

I tell you why, women! Because he can. Just pack a lot of black powder between two anvils, put a notepad with the fuse in between, light up, and watch the anvil on top shooting up 100 to 200 feet into the air, stop for a second, and then fall down pretty much at the same spot.

Yes! I understand you, Mr. Wilkinson. I actually want to hang out with you, drink beer, eat grilled meat, fire up anvils, and change our names to Yosemite Sam and Wile E. Coyote for a day. [Riverfront Times via Boing Boing]

That's pretty much the whole story. There are no before-and-after shots of the mower, which may have in fact been the tractor shown below. There's no photo of the no-doubt dumbfounded dude, a gardener, as it happens, in Croatia. There isn't even an explanation of what the grenade was doing in the yard, save for the statement, from the Zagreb police, that "someone had thrown the grenade into his garden."

Know your enemies, buddy. Apparently, competition for this year's All-Croatia Flower-Growing Tournament is already heating up. [Croatian Times via Asbury Park Press (go Springsteen!)]

Spoiler: The car doesn't quite flatten. It fragments all over the desert.

Spoiler 2: Rockets move very quickly. Or as Adam Savage so aptly puts it, "When that second stage kicked in I was thinking ‘I've never seen anything go that fast', and then I realized, actually that's correct: I have never seen anything go that fast." [via GadgetLab]

The alleged explosion came from the gas cylinder that was in the base of the chair, the part that allowed the user to adjust the seat up and down. The canister gets compressed when you sit on it, but can it actually create enough energy to make the seat cushion explode like that and kill a man? I doubt it, but this is what people are reporting.

In other news, I am working from a beanbag from now on. Sweet merciful crap. [Anorak via The Daily What]

Apart from being rugged against water, shock, dust, immersion, vibration, salt, humidity, solar radiation, altitude, and temperature according to military 810F standards, the "Intrinsically Safe" Motorola i356IS is designed to avoid releasing electrical or thermal energy capable of igniting fuel or explosives.

The push-to-talk phone can send an emergency tone to 20 other Nextel Direct Connect subscribers. [Mobiledia via CNET]

Wang Diange was attending a wake in his home when an explosion took off half of his roof and left him dead in the wreckage. Because it had been a stormy day, family members and the police assumed that lightning was what killed Wang and left half of his home in ruins.

However, as Wang was being placed into the cremation chamber at his own funeral, his body exploded, causing the chamber's oven doors to fly off their hinges. Only then, spectators discovered a small piece of twisted metal, which led them to what really killed Mr. Wang:

A small weather rocket filled with silver iodide—shot into the sky in order to break up hail into rain—failed to explode in the atmosphere, and instead had fallen through Wang's roof and acted like a bullet, instantly killing Wang as it was lodged into his body.

Three years later, the Weather Bureau has given the Wang family 80,000 yuan (roughly $12,000USD) as a compensation for their loss. (And before you ask, no: I hold no relation to this particular Wang.) [Telegraph]

Dangerous Explosive Mallets - Watch more Free VideosYep, it's about what you expected, eh? I try to deliver when I promise things. [Break via The Daily What]

Which is, of course, interestingly ironic since the Abrams M1 typically doesn't use reactive armor, neither does its UK equivalent main battle tank the Challenger 2—they rely on advanced solid armor instead. And you'd need either a very lucky strike, or many impacts to seriously damage one of these beasts with any type of RPG. Russian tanks, like the T72 and T80, on the other hand, do rely on reactive armor and sometimes employ active defense systems like Arena. Would be interesting to see the RPG-30 pitted against the Future Combat System's Quick Kill defenses, don't you think?

Still, makers Bazalt got some military chaps to demonstrate the system recently on TV:[Wired]

The crew trekked down to Cambodia to use the military's equipment. At first, the Cambodian military didn't want to use a tank, so instead they taped a baseball to a rocket. This, obviously, didn't show how well the baseball would travel at such speeds, as it just blew everything up, as you can see above.

Then, after changing their minds, the Cambodians allowed a baseball to be loaded into one of their tanks using some super-secret method that was blurred out like the undergroomed nether regions of a Japanese porn star. This was much more successful, with the tank launching a baseball at about 203mph. The aiming, however, could have been better.

So simple, so ridiculous, so satisfying. Thanks, Japan! [Japan Probe]

The aircraft, which was carrying six crew and 58 passengers, veered off the runway after being hit by two improvised explosive devices, catching fire on its badly damaged port wing. Three people suffered minor injuries on evacuating the stricken transport, which was subsequently "deemed unrecoverable due to operational constraints", according to a Board of Inquiry investigation into the mishap.

The aircraft, a C-130J transport plane, is worth an estimated $82 million in working, non-blowed-up condition. [Danger Room via FlightGlobal]