The Army is set to send its high-tech “counter defilade” weapon to the war zone in the next few months, the first real-world deployment for the much-anticipated XM-25 Individual Airburst Weapon.
Officials announced May 5 that a group of Army Special Forces Soldiers will take the weapon with them to Afghanistan sometime this summer.
Afghanistan veterans who fired the weapon for the first time this week predicted it would be a “game changing” weapon, a gun that can engage Taliban insurgents using distant ridge-tops, thick mud walls and tree lines as cover.
Click the image to read the article and watch a video.
Question: What does it look like when a billion tons of magnetized plasma blast off the surface of the sun, into space, while debris from the explosion falls back onto the solar surface?
Answer: It's looks really, really cool.
The scientists were especially excited to observe "coronal rain," the blobs of plasma falling back to the surface of the sun that make bright splashes as they do so.
You can see a similar version of the video above, only showing the full disk of the sun.
Additionally, Astronomy Picture of the Day recently featured another captivating video of a solar explosion grabbed by the NASA observatory.
Your mother was wrong. It's OK to stare at the sun ... sometimes.
