Down with a bang

NASA's Genesis mission, which was designed to bring samples of the solar wind back to Earth, crashed into the Utah desert in September. The craft had such delicate detectors that mission designers had planned for Hollywood stunt pilots to swoop in and catch the capsule by its parachute, allowing for the softest possible landing. But the parachute didn't open, owing to an error in the design drawings that led to some crucial switches being installed upside down.

A whale of a time

An otherwise ordinary day in a busy Taiwanese street was interrupted in February by 60 tonnes of exploding sperm whale. The dead whale was being delivered by truck to a laboratory for an autopsy, when the carcass exploded after gas from decomposition built up inside. Luckily, only some of the internal organs fell into the street. The focus for the post mortem — the heart and lungs — was still intact.

Newton revealed

A 300,000-word interpretation of the biblical book of Revelation that Isaac Newton wrote in the late seventeenth century was published online in August. The eye-opening text, peppered with references to dragons and reflections on distrust of the Catholic faith, revealed Newton's intense interest in spiritual matters. More than half of Newton's works seem to have been predominantly about religion rather than science.

From the archive

A theoretical physicist aired his life history, including stories of growing up as a Polish Jew in occupied France during the Second World War, in an unusual medium this year. He put it all on the arXiv physics preprint server, which more usually hosts original research. But the archive won't put everything up online. Researchers who feel they have been unfairly excluded from the server banded together this year to form their own ‘archive freedom’ website, to protest at the site's selection criteria.

Beagle wrangling

No one really knows what happened to the ill-fated Beagle 2 lander when it went missing on its descent to Mars this time last year. But the bigger question may be who will pay for the failed attempt. The European Space Agency (ESA) ‘lent’ mission leaders in the United Kingdom €16 million (US$21 million) for the project, and this autumn some ESA-funded researchers were beginning to grumble about whether, and how, the space agency would ever get it back. Britain may or may not want to repay in kind with goods and services, but space scientists were quoted as saying a cheque would be best.