Unwrap the name of a candy bar, and you just might find a story inside. For instance, one chewy treat found in many a checkout lane is named after a family’s beloved horse. And: 50 years ago in the United States, some Latino elementary...
What do you call a guy with a bald pate? A chrome dome? Maybe the lucky fellow is sporting a solar panel for a sex machine. Also, which would you rather open: a can of worms or Pandora’s box? Plus, ordinary vs. ornery, versing vs. versus...
A day on Mars is about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth, so astronomers have a word for that unit of time. They call it a sol, from the Latin word for sun. NASA scientists refer to and the day before the current sol as yestersol. They tried...
carrot-cruncher n.— «Carrot-munchers 1; global confectionery giant 0. For millions of people around the world, Sunday’s climbdown by the makers of Mars Bars was a particularly sweet success. I use the term “carrot-munchers”...
million-mile screwdriver n.— «“Sometimes fixing it is hard at this distance,” said Cox, who is now deputy team leader for the Mars Exploration Rovers. “You find a way to work around it,” what she calls the “million...
taffy-pull terrain n.— «This Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) image shows an example of the extremely odd, seemingly scrambled layered rocks exposed by erosion near the deepest part of the deepest basin on Mars, Hellas...