Working on the International Space Station means three things: it's crowded, you have to exercise to combat the effects of zero gravity, and your hair goes nuts. In this half-hour tour, Commander Sunita Williams shows us around the place during her final day onboard (back in November). It's utterly surreal -- it looks exactly what you'd expect a space station to look like, and Williams floats from section to section showing off the various areas, including the space toilet (just after the 9-minute... READ ON

In this staggering eight-minute video, you take a guided ride on the Solid Rocket Booster alongside the Space Shuttle. The video is interesting but the sound is astonishing -- put on your headphones, watch this, and read the YouTube annotations as they pop up (it may help to make the video fullscreen so they're more legible). Apparently Skywalker Sound helped to mix and enhance the audio, to give you something like the real experience of being strapped to an SRB. My favorite sound is at just under 2:00... READ ON

Artist’s impression of the Tau Ceti system. Created by J. Pinfield for the RoPACS network at the University of Hertfordshire, 2012. A bunch of science-fiction stories just got a little bit more feasible: An international team of astronomers recently announced that Tau Ceti, one of the closest Sun-like stars, may have planets like our solar system. And one of them might be in the star’s habitable... READ ON

Last week, the 3-mile-wide asteroid 4179 Toutatis flew by Earth—on December 12, Toutatis was 4.3 million miles from Earth; on December 13, it was about 4.4 million miles away. Using the antenna from the Deep Space Network, NASA created radar data images of the irregularly-shaped asteroid and used them to create the video below. The images show that the asteroid has ridges and maybe craters; glints in the images might actually be boulders on the surface. Because of the high resolution of the... READ ON