Atom bombs are just the beginning. In the last half-century, the greatest military minds on Earth have developed an arsenal of weapons to make mutually assured destruction seem tame.

Whether these masterpieces of destruction come from miles above Earth or millimeters below the skin, they have one thing in common: they're spooky as hell.

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In 2009, Canada plans to launch a suitcase-sized spacecraft that will be charged with spotting asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth. There's already a big ground-based program underway. NASA regularly identifies and tracks asteroids, calculating the likelihood that they could at some point run into our pale blue dot.

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The small airplane is too dirty for an environmentally threatened world. That’s not the view from eco-activists, but from some of the leading lights in general aviation—the category encompassing small planes such as Cessnas flown by citizen pilots. “At some point, some environmental group is going to figure out that small aircraft fly leaded fuel,” said Mark Moore, NASA’s personal air vehicle program manager, to a meeting of engineers, aviation advocates and a billionaire corporate titan with his own private jet. Their goal, however, is not to bury private aviation, but to remake it as the greenest form of personal transit.

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Granted, it might not seem like such a big deal when astronomers find some of the missing mass in the universe, since there's very little that isn't missing. Roughly 95 percent of the cosmos is either dark matter or dark energy. About five percent of the universe is made up of the normal mass we're familiar with—baryonic matter. Yet by adding up the known stars and galaxies and gas, astronomers have only accounted for about half of that five percent.

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NASA has been catching some extra criticism in the past few days after The Houston Chronicle—Johnson Space Center's hometown paper—ran an expose on credit card abuses at the agency.

The paper reportedly reviewed 451,000 transactions, and among plenty of apparently legitimate purchases, found that NASA employees had also bought iPods, video games and jewelry. The first two you might be able to slide past accounting, if you were, say, an astronaut doing isolation chamber testing, and needed a few gadgets and games to pass the time.

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Yes, it ended well, but the rough-and-tumble landing that astronauts experienced recently as a Soyuz capsule on its way back from the International Space Station missed its landing target by 300 miles sure doesn't sound like something you'd want to do twice.

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By the time Lieutenant Colonel Michael Brill touched down after a combat mission over Iraq earlier today, he had broken his own world record for the most hours spent flying the F-16 Fighting Falcon. Brill, a 421st Expeditionary Fighter Squadron pilot, has logged more than 6,000 hours in the F-16.

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In an auction battle between two odd items yesterday at Bonhams New York, a few fossilized pieces of 130-million-year-old dinosaur dung sold for nearly one thousand dollars, but a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite didn't find any takers.

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The board that has been tasked with reviewing NASA's plans to build a craft that will return astronauts to the Moon apparently has too many insiders.

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Not much in science is more of a mind-bender than thinking about the size and fate of the known universe (except for quantum mechanics and string theory, which also has a lot to do with the size and fate of the universe, albeit on the opposite end of the size spectrum). When we first developed theories about the universe, the model which resulted depicted all of space as static and unchanging, infinite in depth in any direction. Then Einstein posited general relativity and suddenly a whole host of universes were theoretically possible: static, dynamic, infinite, and finite.

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