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So you've landed in an evil boarding school. Chances are your parents thought they were doing the right thing: giving you a great education, sending you to the top disciplinarians who will set you on the proper path in life. But there's something wicked going on behind the cute uniforms and impressive alumni list, and you might not survive until graduation. So what's a life-loving student to do? We look to the best in evil boarding school survivalism. More »
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Carrie-Ann Moss copes with a zero-gravity fire in this stunning sequence from Red Planet. How do you put out a fire when the fire extinguisher sends you flying in the opposite direction? Trinity's on the case. More »
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When humans finally conquer space, we'll still want to keep other creatures as pets. Some science-fiction pets are among our favorite characters, but others, you just want to flush out the airlock. Here's our list of the best and worst. More »
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Time for a little reality check. It seems like almost every day there's a piece of news about how "research suggests there were once oceans floating in the vacuum of space!" or "life could have once existed at the center of the Sun!" You know, we all get a little over-excited sometimes. Well, geochemist Nicholas Tosca of Harvard University put a damper on our enthusiasm yesterday when he calculated that early oceans on Mars were between 10 and 100 times more salty than seawater here on Earth. Even worse, they were probably highly acidic. But pro-Mars life scientists aren't giving up without a fight, After the break, some hopeful scientists speak out on why following Mars' ancient water supply could still lead us to the aliens. More »
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Since 1960 we've been attempting to explore the red planet, and along the way there have been countless failures and lost spacecraft that attest to just how hard it is to fly those 35 million miles from here to there. However, there have also been success stories, like the twin rovers Opportunity and Spirit, who have both overcome mechanical problems, braved dust storms, and sent back enormous amounts of data. Today, after being threatened with a shutdown due to budget cuts, the Martian rovers got a reprieve. They'll be rolling along for many months to come. To celebrate, check out our list of Martian robots and landers who have already served their robotic duty as our slaves, erm we mean allies, on the red planet. More »
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People have been making movies about Mars for decades, but the real boom in semi-realistic Mars movies started about a decade ago — and ended pretty soon afterward. A spate of movies about Mars, some of which aimed to show the first human exploration of the planet, started around 1999 and stopped in 2002... just before NASA started launching a ton of Mars probes and President Bush talked about sending humans to Mars. What killed the Mars movie? More »
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The astronauts who spent the past week performing space walks outside the International Space Station wore the familiar puffy white jumpsuits that nostalgia buffs innocently refer to as a "space suit." But the spacefaring hardcore know it as an EMU, or "Extravehicular Mobility Unit," and the current ones have been in service since 1984. On the ISS, however, the EMU isn't the only space fashion in town. More »
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