Word: moone
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Eddie Murphy will head to the moon this month for a serious rescue mission. He must save Pluto Nash, a movie in danger of collapsing under its own inertia. Nash, a sci-fi comedy featuring Murphy as a lunar-nightclub owner, wrapped a year ago, and was originally scheduled for an April 6 release by Warner Bros.' Castle Rock division. Then it was bumped to the fall. Now it's consigned to the wintry abyss of Jan. 18. Maybe. Producer Martin Bregman (The Bone Collector), who's had Nash in development for 20 years, blames the delay on getting...
...Size Matters NUKEMAN Only a nation famous for miniaturization could conceive of offering the world's first basement-ready nuclear power plant. Japan's Central Research Institute of Electrical Power says the rapid-L, a 6-m by 2-m reactor designed for moon colonies, could eventually be used to light up individual office buildings and apartment blocks. Given Japan's nuclear safety record, that can only be considered a very hot appliance. TINY TAURUS Osaka University researchers have sculpted a plastic bull the size of a red blood cell, a laser technique that may lead to mite-sized machines...
This scenario, reported in the journal Nature last week, is drawn from a new computer simulation that goes far toward resolving puzzling inconsistencies in earlier studies of the moon's formation. That event was, of course, of overwhelming importance in our planet's history, since it reduced Earth's rotational wobble and set the stage for ocean tides and ultimately life, not to mention untold moon-June poesy. Earlier simulations required a much larger object crashing into an Earth only partly formed and spinning too fast to explain Earth's current rotational rate--our 24-hour day. One study needed...
...after a number of tries, they arrived at a scenario in which an object, the size of Mars but with only one-tenth the Earth's mass, striking at a highly oblique angle, ejected enough debris from itself and our planet's iron-deficient outer layers to form the moon, which contains very little iron. Left behind was an Earth roughly the size it is today...
Apart from satisfying our curiosity about how the moon formed, the new work has broader implications. Explains Asphaug: "It's now known that giant collisions are a common aspect of planet formation, and these big impacts might go a long way toward explaining the puzzling diversity observed among planets." That diversity was emphasized last week when astronomers using the University of California's Lick telescope reported the discovery of two planets in orbit around a distant star. Unlike all previously discovered extra-solar planets, which have highly elliptical orbits, these two were moving in nearly circular paths. Alas, even...