US government once ‘planned to nuke the Moon’

The US government once made plans to nuke the Moon, reported Vice. The top-secret and now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme saw officials from the department of defence develop plans to use nuclear weapons to tunnel through the moon to harvest “lightweight materials”. Although plans to nuke the Moon have been shelved, Nasa is still moving ahead with plans to mine space rocks from it.

Woman rescued after toilet fall

A woman had to be rescued after she fell into a toilet while trying to retrieve her mobile phone, reported Sky News. The woman was using a deep, non-flush vault toilet in a forest northwest of Seattle, Washington State, when she dropped her handset. She used dog leads to tie herself to the toilet as she reached for the phone, but she fell headfirst into the vault. “I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and that was a first,” said one of the firefighters who saved her.

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China to protect Earth from dinosaur fate

China will try to deflect an asteroid from crashing into Earth using a high-tech new planetary defence system. Wu Yanhua of the China National Space Administration said that Beijing is sketching a planetary defence plan designed to counter threats from deadly asteroids. The plan could “help the whole planet avoid a fate like that of the dinosaurs”, said the Daily Star.