I prefer things being laser-cheap and rocket-thin.

It's hard to imagine how this could have even been typed into the article. It seems like common sense wouldn't even ALLOW you to refer to a park 50% larger that NYC's Central Park using "square feet" without pause....

Maybe not crazy, but you hold an odd definition of "nature". You don't consider the Moon as natural? And, considering the entire Earth formed from material that originated from space, the line of reasoning quickly arrives as to what's part of nature and what isn't: pretty much everything in the universe.

It's not like this is intended to be historically accurate. This is in the same vein as the movies Gladiator or Troy. The historical references are just for mood and possibly a little context. This is a good guy/bad guy movie, nothing more. To think that such a cartoonish depiction of Xerxes (or the Persians, or…

Wait a minute... one of those missiles looks photoshopped.

Wait. People are still claiming we never went there? This is still a thing?

In these cases, they are on a star, so more than likely plasma.

Ah, true. Tho your comment seemed to disparage NASA's PR Dept., not io9, hence my comment.

I guess I can't breathe without carbon either then.

They credit the USGS. Prominently, actually.

Right. Which is why I said "in this context". Hydrogen quickly floats upwards, especially when on fire, and anything that presents an ignition risk he might encounter out there (lightning? Aliens? Ghostships?) isn't likely going to be well mediated by having chosen helium instead.

Why don't these people use Hydrogen!? In this context, it's just as safe as Helium.

At least the Simpsons haven't, yet.

So I can buy an iPad mini, and all I have to do is get closer to it and it turns into a full sized iPad screen!? What a bargain!

Why's it deceptive? You're the one that's interpreting the fact that they gave an existing storage strategy a marketable name and are now somehow implying that similar things are unavailable elsewhere, or that they invented it.

Well, judging from how "prevalent" this problem has been made out to be, one would assume that it happens on just about any bright light source. I mean, if it's an occasional issue that happens under very specific circumstances, it starts to sound more like a non-issue. Every camera can have sub-optimal performance…

Strange. I can't get my iPhone 5 to produce any appreciable purple flare. Direct shots or with the sun peeking in, they are all fine. I wonder if it's only an issue with some production runs.

Why would they fake this? I mean, there's no Red Menace to one-up, and its not like there's much political benefit to spending $2b on a geology mission. Only for the purely scientific gains does this mission make sense, and therefore only in real life.

Yep. They especially hate free people.

I'm not going to let my world-view be dictated by facts. His comment felt thruthy, so I'm going with the Israel vs Pakistan throwdown.