46 years ago, Alan Shepard pulled out a makeshift six-iron he smuggled on board Apollo 14 and hit two golf balls on the lunar surface, becoming the first - and only - person to play golf anywhere other than Earth.

With little atmosphere and much lower gravity, golf balls on the moon travel much farther than on the earth. Alan attributes his shot of nearly 200 yards to this fact alone.


The other sport played was javelin. ...

The tough-yet-fragile physical properties of the tadpole-shaped pieces of glass known as Prince Rupert’s drops have puzzled physicists for as long as, well, there have been physicists. Bash the head with a hammer, and a drop gets barely a scratch. But break off its thin tail, and it shatters into fine powder.

Researchers long ago realized that the strength of the drops - named for Prince Rupert of Bavaria, who presented five of them to Britain’s King Charles II in 1660 - has something to do with stresses in the glass created when a drop is made by letting a blob of molten glass fall into water, so that it cools rapidly.

Twenty years ago, a pair of researchers took high-speed video of a drop disintegrating showing that, when the tail is brok ...

School and summer don't mix.

In fact, thinking and summer don't really mix. Yet we don't want to return to school feeling like a lower-IQ version of Keanu Reeves. How to strike a balance?
 
I'm sure you've all had that feeling before: You bust out the first assignment of the new school year, you sit down and grab a pencil, you put that pencil to the paper and you... stare. Gaze. Daydream. Sniffle?
 
"Dude, how is this stuff even remotely difficult?" you say. "It was a piece of cake four months ago."
 
Yeah, then that whole summer thing got in the way. Funny how cruel overexposure to sunlight, fireworks, burnt hot dogs and fried Twinkies can be.
 
Four months off is enough time to forget a semester. Six months will erase a year. And as I found out l ...