For months, we have pored over every screenshot, every glimpse of footage, and every toy package relating to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But did we miss the Kurt Vonnegut shout-out? Or are we just seeing things?
What’s worse than a broken space-toilet? A broken space-toilet when it’s your very first shift as boss, and suddenly you have to work on the logistics of either getting it fixed or landing your astronauts in Africa. This is Flight Director Rob Kelso’s first-hand account of the narrowly-averted shitstorm.
We gave you what we thought were pretty good guesses as to what twist J.J. Abrams has in store for Luke Skywalker. But some of you exceeded even our imagination.
How did that tiny, complicated spiky tip on the Apollo modules transform into a usable tunnel for astronauts after they docked? Through a bit of engineering ingenuity still in use today.
Actually, there are a LOT of ways that Star Wars could troll its fans, and audiences in general. Almost a whole galaxy’s worth of ways, in fact. But commenter Sean Kelley hit on a great one.
Everybody loves role-playing games (unless you’re irrationally worried about Satan.) Escaping into a fantasy world, surrounded by like-minded nerds, is just the best thing ever. Except when it isn’t, because someone is deciding to be a total Gelatinous Cube. Here are some of your worst RPG horror stories.
We asked for nightmare tales of the Apple Genius Bar—from both sides of the bar. One Apple Store employee submitted a customer encounter that makes us despair about mankind.
Among the many revelations about Pluto we’ve got in the last weeks was the existence of a very strangely-iced surface and the lack of craters. But does one have anything to do with the other?
War plays itself out on a literal battlefield, but it also makes its way into every aspect of our lives well beyond that—including technological. Here, a soldier explains how a basic technology has changed the way soldiers live.
In 1994, a comet collided with Jupiter. But, even before that fatal collision, the comet was exceptional for something else: the tool that had first discovered it a year earlier.
Out in Manchester, a remarkably powerful, 3,200 ton radio telescope has sat atop a field for almost 60 years. But the story of how it got there—and how near it came, even mid-construction, to not being there—is a tale of an incredibly close scientific call.
Scientific labs are in the business of uncovering truths. But, when you look a little closer at how they work, there’s another truth coming out of them: The process to getting there is a lot messier than it looks from the outside.
In the 1950s, physicist Chien-Shiung Wu was doing research at Columbia University when two other physicists approached her with a bold idea, but no way to prove it—until Wu found one.
By the time it arrives in your home, cast iron is one of the most durable materials you’re likely to lay your hands on. Getting it to that point, though, turns it to be an incredibly finicky process.
Harold Ridley was an ophthalmologist treating the eye injuries of British fighter pilots during World War II, when he noticed an odd similarity between those injuries. And what he learned when he looked closer changed how we treat cataracts today.
Academic rivalries can sometimes result in some pretty impressive science. Here’s how a war between two paleontologists ended up yielding over 140 new species — but also destroyed a lot of things on its way.
When the Nazis invaded Denmark in 1940, Niels Bohr was in possession of two of the Nobel Prize’s gold medals for Physics that had previously been sent to him for safe-keeping. Here’s what he did to hide them — and how the Nobel prizes were brought back again.
Scooby-Doo had plenty to teach us about meddling kids, hijinks, and the virtues of DIY van repair. But was there also a little something in there about the scientific method?
Over two thousand years ago, Archimedes invented a tool with huge implications for ancient Greek farmers — and we’re still using it today, but in a different form.
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