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.

Your kid borrows the car, blasts too many techno tracks, and blows out the subwoofer. It used to be that you´d have two choices: Buy a new one (woofer, not kid) or put up with a hoarse bass line. But when a subwoofer pops, it´s usually only the voice coil-the part that drives the cone-that´s burned out; the rest of the assembly is just fine. Boston Acoustics´s SPG555 subwoofer is the first with a replaceable voice coil that you can install yourself.