Parts of the Earth’s mantle might be loaded with diamonds, if a new model turns out to be correct. But no, you can’t mine them—they’d be almost a hundred miles below the surface.

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.

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.

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.

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.