What should we do if we discover a 500m wide asteroid is on a collision course for Earth? That is the worst-case scenario that the new ‘Red Storm’ supercomputer is being used to solve, by simulating the effects of throwing nukes at the incoming boulder to try to destroy or deflect it. Bruce Willis was not available for comment.

There’s just too much carbon dioxide around at the moment. But we’ve just discovered something else it can do – CO2 subjected to extremely high pressures forms an amorphous glassy crystalline solid. It may be quite useful someday, but not until it can be made stable at normal conditions.

The space-geek blogosphere is abuzz with NASA’s release of this video of a meteoroid impacting the moon, back in early May this year. To be honest, the video isn’t that impressive…until you sit and think about scale and distance, realise how big an event it was, and how lucky we were to catch it.

Computer simulations have always held an inferior position to actual experimental results, as far as hardcore science is concerned. But this is no longer the case according to Eliot Fang, who, in a talk given to a US nuclear lab’s general meeting, denounced the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ dismissals of simulation, and claimed instead that simulation can show things that experiments miss.

Rear Admiral Chris Parry in the United Kingdom has gone public with an apocalyptic vision of the future in which globalization destroys the validity of borders and climate change, overpopulation and selective reproduction bring the instability of failed states into the heretofore isolated environs of the industrialized West. Seems a bit overheated to me, but then I suppose that’s what a blue sky thinker for the military is supposed to do.