Word: asteroids
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...most people's lives, high drama is not an asteroid heading for Earth or a battle on Omaha Beach. It is the agony and suspense in an intimate conversation. Do you love me? Have you betrayed me? Will you leave me? The answers to those questions make the heart soar or sink; they leave lasting marks on the soul, like a trophy or a gravestone. Years later, we look back and think: from that moment, everything was different. Yet movies rarely touch on this form of domestic convulsion. They offer escapism--not just from daily drudgery but from our most...
Their financial calculations make sense. Producers know that big stars and unprecedented explosions are a winning combination. We are all inherently intrigued by the idea of watching Bruce Willis save the Earth from a deadly asteroid, or Ferris Bueller take on a 50-ton lizard...
...Northern Pacific. In a report in the current issue of Nature, Kyte notes that the little chunk contains concentrations of metals (such as iridium and nickel) and mineral textures that clearly show that it is extraterrestrial and that it probably was once part of a much larger asteroid...
...fact that the meteorite exists at all, says Kyte, also strongly suggests that it came from an asteroid, not from a comet, as many scientists still believe. He notes that comets strike the earth at such high speeds--many of them well over 100,000 m.p.h.--that they are usually completely melted and vaporized. But a typical asteroid hits at less than half that speed, and some fragments often survive. So why did this one turn up 5,400 miles away from the Yucatan impact site? Kyte believes it was flung by the explosion high above the atmosphere...
Death in the movies is usually swift and merciful. A gun goes off, and someone's brains are splattered Pollock-like across a wall. Or a blue steel blade flashes in the night, and someone is left crumpled on the carpet, surrounded by a spreading crimson stain. Or an asteroid strikes Earth, and hundreds of colorful New Yorkers are crushed by the Chrysler Building. Sigh. We should all die so crisply and photogenically...