There's no reason you should be familiar with comet C/2010 X1 "Elenin." It's a relatively small ball of ice that's scheduled to pass us at a distance of 21 million miles on October 16th. If you are familiar with Elenin, it's either because you're an obsessive sky watcher, or because you've been reading too many doomsday and conspiracy websites.

251.4 million years ago, the Permian extinction event destroyed the atmosphere, wiped out almost all life on the planet, and was generally a bad time. This BP oil leak is reminding scientists of the conditions of that event just a bit too much.

With the popcorn-fueled apocalypse entering theaters this Friday, there's one organization that's not so thrilled about the hysteria "2012" is drumming up. That'd be NASA, and the space agency is — as you'd imagine — reassuring everyone that it's going...