In Pictures: The 31 weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2012

Maybe it's the doom predictions some folks are fearing about the end of the Mayan calendar this year or maybe these guys are obsessed with old Bruce Willis movies. Either way a class of physics students from the University of Leicester decided to evaluate whether the premise of Willis' 1998 "Armageddon" movie -- where a group of oil drillers is sent by NASA to detonate nuclear devices on an asteroid that threatens to destroy Earth -- could actually happen. The students found that the device would need to be about a billion times stronger than the biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth -- the Soviet Union's 50 megaton hydrogen bomb "Big Ivan" -- in order to save the world from the asteroid.