Disasters

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features.

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Partly to help explain solar eclipses, the ancient Egyptians had a story about the serpent god Apep, the Uncreator, who tried to swallow the sun god Ra as he crossed the sky.

Apep -- the Greeks called him Apophis -- personified death, destruction and chaos. His opponent was the goddess Ma'at, who represented all that was light and truth.

Now, a group of NASA scientists is hoping Ma'at will once again help humans ward off the harbinger of destruction.

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Early this morning, thousands of scientists had their hearts broken as a NASA satellite crucial to studying climate change suffered a critical failure during launch and plunked into the Pacific Ocean.

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Texas-size asteroids make for exciting summer blockbusters, but when it comes to long-term damage, they're not the most menacing threat out there. Lurking at the edge of our galaxy are giant molecular dust clouds -- agglomerations of hydrogen gas, small organic molecules and minerals -- roughly 150 light-years across. If our solar system hit one, it would take 100,000 years to pop out on the other side.

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Humans are fleeting visitors on this roiling rock in the universe. On December 26, 2004, at 58 minutes and 49 seconds past midnight GMT, Mother Earth reacquainted us with this immutable fact. For millions of years, a creeping slab of Earth´s crust—the India Plate—had been grinding headlong into a similarly stubborn chunk of rock called the Burma Plate. Like a clash of Brobdingnagian armies, millennia of pent-up kinetic energy suddenly exploded from the seabed, a scant 100 miles from Sumatra, Indonesia.

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