Asteroid 2015 BZ509 is orbiting the wrong way around the Sun. Why? According to a hyped new paper from astronomers Fathi Namouni and Helen Morais, this asteroid with its contrary orbit may not be native to our Solar System at all—it may have been captured from interstellar space.
So you just bought a $1,000 iPhone X. It’s fast, gorgeous, and everything you could ask for in an absurdly priced consumer device. There’s just one problem. As good as it looks, it’s way too precious for life without some kind of protection. You’re going to need a case, but what kind should you get? Plastic is for…
When you think about what makes a planet special, maybe you think about its size, its composition, how far it is from the Sun, and maybe how large its collection of apples is. You are probably not thinking about its density. But maybe you should be.
Norwegian citizens are about to go Liam Neeson in Taken on the shameless vandal who desecrated one of their most beloved natural monuments—a troll dick. Well, it’s a rock that looks like a dick. But it’s supposed to be a troll dick, specifically.
Like maintaining a zen garden, or pruning a bonsai tree, some people stack and balance rocks as a way to relax. But robots don’t really experience emotional stress, so why bother teaching a bot to balance rocks? One day, this robot’s skills could prove invaluable when it comes to building structures on distant worlds…
Last year, artist Neil Mendoza turned a hamster running in a wheel into a talented sketch artist. This year he’s pulled off an even more amazing feat by turning inanimate rocks into a talented (literal) rock band that plays a surprisingly decent cover of The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.”
When you blow up a quarry that’s 65 feet high with 75 tons of explosives, you turn the rock wall into a tsunami wave that sends nearly 400,000 tons of rocks flying everywhere. The blast of the Bremanger Quarry in Norway looks great because it was carefully planned, with explosives planted in 454 blast holes made along…
This may look like just another rock, but its so much more than that. It’s also a storage unit for carbon emissions—and it could finally give us a way to backtrack a bit on what we’ve done to our climate.
One of the two best feelings a kid can have is that immediate king of the world, I’ve got this life thing all figured out of learning how to skip a stone across a body of water (the other is the freedom of learning of how to ride a bike, I think). But that smug satisfaction of throwing rocks that jump like 2-4 times…
I think this silly animation about a giant rock creature trying to rescue a town is a hilariously dark lesson that shows how some things just aren't worth saving. Or that maybe all our work is useless. Or perhaps that bad intentions can cause good actions. Or whatever, maybe it's just a really fun CG animation.
If there's one thing to be said for Curiosity's mission on Mars so far, it certainly hasn't been boring. From supposed Martian squirrels to strange flashes of light on the surface, the rover has kept us entertained. And now there's this rather odd... ball.
The most famous coal seam fire smolders underneath Centralia, Pennsylvania, but thousands of such underground fires burn all over the world. In the American West, where subterranean coal still burn, ancient conflagrations created the red-inflected landscape we see today.
There's nothing like some casual rock precipitation to make you glad you packed your umbrella.
A few weeks ago, Russian divers extracted a 1,250-pound chunk of the infamous Chelyabinsk meteorite from a lake where it landed on February 15. The massive space stone ended up cracking into three pieces—and though scientists may have cursed the clumsy divers, I was interested in something else: What was inside the…
All human existence is a meaningless blip in the grand scheme of time. Nice thought for a Monday, right? But you knew that already, so here's another way to think about it: All the grand monuments we build are made of rock thousands of times older than the historical blips they commemorate.
We've all seen our fair share of rocks, and most of them aren't that pretty. The ones that are though, can be totally mind-blowing. Ryoji Tanaka, a Japanese photographer and chemist, likes to capture some of the most striking elements, minerals, and compounds in close-up (like the Uranium-containing cuprosklodowskite…
Good news for anyone who's stared in envy as NASA sends rover after rover to explore and study Mars. You no longer need countless millions and a team of rocket scientists to perform your own experiments on the red planet. For just $25 ThinkGeek will sell you your very own shard of our celestial neighbor.
This is weird: these rocks combusted spontaneously inside a woman's pocket, seriously scorching her right leg and hands with third degree burns. They were collected in a beach and look fairly normal. Nobody knows yet why they started to burn with such strong flames.
