Planetary Resources just wrapped up a press conference in Seattle, officially announcing both its existence and its ambitious plan to mine near-Earth asteroids. We were listening in live, and here's everything you need to know about how this asteroid mining plan is going to work and when it's going to happen.

Though science fiction can help inspire us to create and strive toward new technological breakthroughs, it can also have a decidedly negative effect, at least according to one former NASA scientist: It makes people forget that rocket science is, you know, rocket science.

It's easy to think of the sun as little more than that yellow thing up in the sky that looks kinda nice when it sets, but every once in a while, we get a reminder of its awesome star power that puts us in our place. The folks at NASA now have a high-powered satellite trained on the center of our solar system, and it's captured a solar tornado so big it could burn five Earths to ashes in a second.

If you're of the right age, the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion was permanently seared into your memory, a vivid reminder that space travel is still a dangerous, potentially fatal pursuit. Nothing brings that into sharp relief like this newly discovered amateur video, which captures the disaster in raw, 8mm horror.