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The bombing of Nagasaki, the explosion of the Hindenburg, and the Challenger disaster have all been immortalized into smoke-filled photography. Artist Brock Davis has reproduced those iconic explosions in an unlikely medium: cauliflower. More »
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The famous Barking Dog Experiment combines a few chemicals in a tube and causes explosions that sound, most people say, like barking dogs. I say they sound a little more like phasers, or other ray guns. Learn a little chemistry, listen to a few explosions, and judge for yourself. More »
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The military's newest digital training system is gonna open a can of whoop-ass on new recruits. And maybe a sonic blaster, too. More »
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There's a simple way to make liquid nitrogen cause an explosion. To be clear, this is something you shouldn't do. But there are tons of people doing it! Some of them in pools. Find out the easy way to do it, and why you should always set a liquid nitrogen bomb off where there is plenty of space and air flow. More »
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Although plenty of people have looked into the physics of explosions, there have been some basic questions left unanswered. One of them is why some fires suddenly go supersonic. Now there's a new theory about DDT explosions. More »
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Everyone knows you can't survive a nuclear blast in a refrigerator (unless you're Indiana Jones). But what can the human body withstand? We take a look at the damage explosions cause and how humans survive it. More »
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Right now, three major telescopes are focused on a huge, sustained burst of energy coming from the center of a galaxy 3.8 billion light years away. Astronomers are speculating on what it could be. More »
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We all know about how fire behaves in outer space: It doesn't. All those action movies were wrong. Fire needs oxygen and oxygen isn't abundant outside of Earth's atmosphere. Fires can happen inside a contained, oxygenated environment in space, but they don't behave the way they do on Earth. The Earth's gravity imposes a lot of conditions on fire that wouldn't happen in microgravity or zero g. Here's why astronauts can't burn a candle at both ends. More »
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Laptops and humans aren't the only things that can spontaneously combust. Pistachios are so likely to burst into flames that there are strict shipping codes to keep them from doing so. More »
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Here's a fiery portrait of India's second failed launch of 2010. The GSAT-5P, launching a new geosynchronous communications satellite, broke up in the first stage and exploded. How did this happen? More »
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Nitroglycerin destroys lives by exploding, and saves them by stopping heart problems. How can it do both? More »
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The Michael Bayifier photo editor allows you to turn everyday photos into adrenaline-pumping scenes of incendiary baditude — just look what we did to io9! Add a Shia head or ten for beaucoup comic relief! [Via The Presurfer] More »
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A warning to salvagers. Underwater conditions 'arm' iron cannonballs and cookware. Bringing them to the surface can cause them to explode. More »
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Sony may have only just figured out that Seth Rogen looks nothing like the Green Hornet, but they're still going ahead with Michel Gondry's allegedly quirky take on the superhero. Check out the first ever pictures. What do you think? More »
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This video is one of the scariest, most awesome things I've ever seen. It's a 360 degree view of the demolition last month of the Cowboys' stadium - seen from cameras positioned inside. More »
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It seems that there are limitless ways that sugar can kill people. Not content to limit itself to slow murder due to caloric intake, it has branched out into sudden, violent death. Find out how and why sugar can explode. More »
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io9 continues its award-winning series on why water is the most dangerous substance on earth. Discover yet another way to make water explode with simple items from around the house. More »
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Last week, a long-dormant volcano erupted in Iceland, creating a 1 kilometer vent in the earth and spewing lava and steam. Now the continuing eruption has opened a massive, second fissure in the icy ground. More »
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Blue straggler stars are an astronomical mystery - they are bigger and age more slowly than stars born at the same time. It turns out these stars are created by two kinds of violent interstellar struggles. More »
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A bad review must have really gotten under Dean Koontz's skin. His new book, Relentless, is about an evil book critic who gives a nice novelist a bad review — and then becomes a monster. More »
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How do stars get to be four times as massive as our own sun? By exploding and then eating the products of their own firebursts. More »
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Over the weekend, an industrial-age legend was blown up — literally — in Sheffield, England. The Tinsley water cooling towers, two hourglass-shaped, 250-foot-tall structures, were built almost 70 years ago as part of a long-demolished power plant. Several local artists tried to convert the abandoned structures into art projects, but the lonely hulks were instead blown up by a company that is replacing them with a biomass power station. Thousands of people gathered to watch the towers blown up, and now you can see the tragic carnage too. More »
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What do you get when you mix a frizzy-haired, grandfatherly chemist with his younger, cackling, explosion-loving sidekick? The Periodic Table of Videos! Put together by a team at the University of Nottingham in the UK, this gargantuan effort of 118 short vids chronicled everything from Hydrogen (very explosive) to Oxygen (also very explosive) to Sodium (not explosive...until you add water!) on down the list all the way to Ununoctium, element 118, of which only three atoms have ever been observed. Check out the oxygen pyrotechnics below. More »
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Need to get rid of a bunch of space trash, or jumpstart a wormhole? Now you can, at least if you can get near enough to a neutron star when it's heading into explosion mode. Using NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), some astronomers have made an extraordinary breakthrough: they've discovered how to predict when neutron stars will unleash massive explosions. What this means, in essence, is that stellar explosions can be compared to Old Faithful, the geyser in Yellowstone Park that erupts at precise times. More »
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Motorcycles and trucks will be spinning and bursting into flames in the dark quarantined-nation epic Doomsday, which opens in 10 days, according to this new TV spot. And a guy from the Society for Creative Anachronism will sword-fight with a riot grrl. Not only that, but a man with a blond mohawk will show you whether he has any armpit hair while shouting about the end of the world. If all that doesn't scream "instant cult classic," I don't know what does. Click through for two more clips. More »
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Here are some photos of the Navy testing its new electromagnetic railgun at the Naval Surface Warfare Center. The railgun fires at 10.44 megajoules, with a muzzle velocity of 2520 meters per second. Click through for more details and a gallery of splodey pics. More »
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This image of "Nano-Explosions" won first prize in this year's "Science As Art" competition. Fanny Beron from the École Polytechnique de Montréal used an electron scanning micrograph to record the explosion that happened when a CoFeB magnetic array was overloaded. The chaotic blasts are a "reminder that nanoscale research can have unpredicted consequences at a high level." Beron has also been a star soccer goalie. [NanoWerk] More »
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The largest piece of gunpowder art in history detonated last year in Fujian province, China. Cai Guoqiang, a New York-based artist, designed the "controlled explosion" to leave burn marks in the shape of a 59-foot-by-30-foot banyan tree. Check out the results. More »
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Giant rockets fought in space yesterday when the Japanese military shot down a mid-range ballistic missile using this Standard Missile 3 (SM-3). The ballistic missile was zooming along 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean. Japan is the first US ally to attempt these kinds of space war moves, and they did it from a US Navy missile range off the coast of Kauai. Check out more fire and a Japanese military boat in photos after the jump. More »
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