Iapetus

The object in the background is Saturn's moon, Iapetus. As reported yesterday in the New Scientist, a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena has come up with a convoluted (my word) warming and freezing scheme to account for Iapetus' odd "walnut" shape. The object in the foreground is... a sandstone spherule from Texas, about 10 millimeters across. Hmmmm... Would warming and freezing have created the spherule's "walnut" shape? Unlikely. Yet they look so similar. One argument — which I find quite persuasive — is that electrical plasma discharge, operating in identical ways across vastly different scales, accounts for both moon and spherule. The fun part is that a non-scientist like myself can look and see, whereas highly trained scientists might not be able to. What a world!