17 Oct '12, 8pm

A Good Week for Interplanetary Violence: Four research teams show how massive collisions formed our moon…and Sat...

A Good Week for Interplanetary Violence: Four research teams show how massive collisions formed our moon…and Sat...

This is the week for gazing up at the moon floating serenely in the night sky and imagining cataclysmic interplanetary collisions. Picture a Mars-sized planet slamming into the Earth about four-and-a-half billion years ago, injecting its iron core into our planet and sending a couple of quintillions of tons of vaporized mantle rock into orbit, where it forms a ring that re-condenses into the Man in the Moon. Planetary scientists at the Washington University at St. Louis (WUSTL) and Scripps Institution of Oceanography have supplied a key piece of evidence supporting just that giant-impact scenario of lunar formation—continuing the evolution of a 1975 conference-room conjecture into the leading explanation of selenic cosmogony. (The 1975 date is a little artificial. The idea that the moon is an offspring of Earth has emerged many times over the centuries. The 1975 incarnatio...

Full article: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/astrophysics...

Tweets

@KateEGuest These are them Good stuff.

eatingasia.typepad.com 20 Oct '12, 12pm

Modifying their bread to suit local tastes without compromising on wholesomeness has been as much of a challenge for the t...

10 Things We Didn't Know A Week Ago #TGIF

10 Things We Didn't Know A Week Ago #TGIF

searchenginepeople.com 19 Oct '12, 1pm

"He gave the example of a typical launch, where in the last couple of weeks you are bunkered down trying to get everything...

Nature Photo of the Week: Stealthy Fox

Nature Photo of the Week: Stealthy Fox

blog.nature.org 19 Oct '12, 1pm

Wildlife photography has a wonderful ability of taking a viewer up close and personal to an animal. Flickr photographer An...

Harvard scientists suggest the Moon was once pa...

straitstimes.com 18 Oct '12, 2am

(REUTERS) - A new theory put forward by Harvard scientists suggests the Moon was once part of the Earth that spun off afte...