This is another of my "Doomsday Debunking" articles, using science and astronomy to debunk some of the crazy modern myths about the end of the world.  This time it's the idea that the eclipse of the sun on 21st August in the US is a "sign" that the world is about to end. If you are an astronomer or scientists you will just LOL at this for sure. But for some people this fear is like a living nightmare for them. They contact me, extremely scared that the world is, literally, about to end because of this eclipse. They probably flunked maths and physics at school and just don't have the scientific and astronomical background to evaluate it.

With all the tense situation about North Korea, I thought I should do a new post about the situation there. I'm doing this as part of my "Doomsday Debunked" articles I do to help people who are often very scared that the world will end in one way or another. First this is not a risk of global nuclear war. It’s nothing like the Cuban missile crisis. There we had two major powers facing each other on a hair-trigger. And each had the capability of destroying the other’s military capabilities.

Have you wondered why we can't see the Apollo landing sites from Earth? Moon is so far away that even the ISS at around 108 meters in length would span just over one pixel if Hubble were to photograph it on the Moon at its highest resolution. From NASA:

Can Hubble see the Apollo landing sites on the Moon?

No, Hubble cannot take photos of the Apollo landing sites.

“An object on the Moon 4 meters (4.37 yards) across, viewed from HST, would be about 0.002 arcsec in size. The highest resolution instrument currently on HST is the Advanced Camera for Surveys at 0.03 arcsec. So anything we left on the Moon cannot be resolved in any HST image. It would just appear as a dot.”

You may have seen this tank filling puzzle that's gone viral. But have you wondered what happens at a faster flow rate? Someone has tried it out, with a 3D printer. First though, let's look at the original puzzle. 

 Here it is.

Look closely, as it says.

Most people answer “G”.

If that's your answer too, take another close look. Many of the pipes are blocked, The line that blocks off D from C is not a mistake.

To find the real answer - well first, it looks like it's just a drip at a low flow rate from the drawing. So let's assume that..

From A to B to C is straightforward. None of them can fill before the next one.

JP Aerospace is an interesting company - in the city of Rancho Cordova, CA., California, JP Aerospace, America's OTHER Space Program. Their aim is to develop ways to send airships up into the stratosphere - and more controversially, all the way to orbit with their "Orbital Airships" vision. The airships would accelerate very slowly, at a rate of perhaps a few centimeters per second increase in speed every second, over several days, until they reach orbital velocity. Can they, or can't they, or how far can they go?

This is an update to my article: How A "Dwarf Planet" Gas Giant Could Challenge IAU Definition - Pluto, Ceres, Haumea Etc Can All Be Planets. That article pointed out that we could discover a gas giant in our own solar system that satisfies the IAU definition of a "dwarf planet" as it wouldn't clear its orbit if it was far enough away. First, I should have pointed out there that the WISE search has not ruled out gas giants in the remote parts of our solar system.