What do you do with a C-130 cargo aircraft that has made a crash-landing in an insecure area of Iraq? If you’re the 447th Expeditionary Operations Support Squadron you wire it with explosives and you blow it up. Again and again and again… until it’s in small enough bits to load onto a flatbed and ship back to an air base. Apparently it’s pretty rare for an aircraft to make emergency landings in the field, which is good news. Though if it resulted in more videos like this, we wouldn’t complain. [PointNiner via Danger Room]
You should, by now, be very familiar with the Mentos and Coke explosion effect. After all, we’ve even shown how to make your own booby trap version. But did you know that parts of the science behind it were a mystery? Until now, that is. A physics team at Appalachian State University did a whole range of tests, varying the substance dropped in from Fruit Mentos to dishwasher detergent and checking all the Coke types. Serious science stuff.
Now I don’t want to alarm you, but there just happens to be a binary star about 8,000 light years from us that’s on the brink of exploding. Not a big deal normally, but this one happens to have its pole pointed right at us, which means that if it explodes in a gamma-ray burst it could shoot a beam of destructive, ozone-layer-melting gamma rays at us all Death-Star-like.
Toshiba recalls another 10,000 Sony-made batteries as the exploding battery fever grinds ever closer to an unsatisfying conclusion. [eWeek via Crunchgear] More »
