bomb

Dr. Strangelove's Major 'King' Kong might have trouble riding this sleek bomb down to the ground, but that's the entire point of a munition meant to reduce collateral damage.

The Focused Lethality Munition, on display at the Air Force Association show, puts the emphasis on precision, with a GPS-guided inertial guidance system that supposedly has hardening against possible jamming.

The September Popular Science feature "Shock to the System" (on newsstands next week), discusses the hidden danger of brain trauma faced by soldiers exposed to bomb blasts. The article reveals that one in five American soldiers serving in Iraq may be suffering from a brain injury—not from direct contact with explosions, but from the effects of bomb blast waves that can cause life-threatening damage at the cellular level, even from distances previously considered safe.

Tiny cars are nothing new. Fifty years ago, Europe hoped to entice Americans with a different mini auto. The Bomb was small enough to fit under some trucks but got an impressive 100 miles per gallon.

In a word: no. It would be impossible to destroy the Red Planet with any device scientists can build, let alone finance. Planets can survive enormous assaults; the Hellas Basin, a Martian crater about 1,300 miles wide, testifies to the planet having once collided with an asteroid so massive that the impact generated well over a hundred million megatons of energy. If a meteoroid that size were to hit Earth, it could wipe out life on an entire continent.