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Glass From Nuclear Test Site Shows the Moon Was Born Dry (newscientist.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: We can't recreate the giant impact that led to the moon's formation in a lab, but humans have made some other big explosions. By examining residue from the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, researchers have cracked a window into the moon's past. On 16 July 1945, the U.S. army detonated a nuclear weapon for the first time in an operation codenamed Trinity (see photo, above). As the bomb exploded with an energy equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT, the sand underneath it melted, producing a thin sheet of mostly green glass dubbed trinitite. The explosion brought the area around the bomb to temperatures over 8000 C and pressures nearing 80,000 atmospheres. These extreme conditions are similar to those created as the moon formed in a colossal collision between Earth and another rock, probably about the size of Mars. Fortunately for planetary science, scientists meticulously measured and recorded the details of the Trinity detonation, so there is plenty of information to work with. Day and his colleagues took advantage of that past precision to investigate why the moon has surprisingly little water and other volatiles with a relatively low boiling point -- much less than Earth. To do so, they studied the distribution of one volatile element, zinc, in trinitite collected at different distances out from the explosion's center. They found that the closer to the explosion the trinitite formed, the less zinc it had, especially when it came to zinc's lighter isotopes. That's because these evaporated in the intense heat of the explosion, while the heavier isotopes didn't and so remained in the trinitite. The ratios of different forms of zinc left behind in trinitite showed remarkable parallels to what was observed in the moon rocks retrieved in the Apollo missions. This means that zinc and other volatile elements, most notably water, probably evaporated off the moon while it was being formed in a violent collision or soon afterward, while its surface was still incredibly hot. The study has been published in Science Advances.
Pro tip: lice in many areas have become virtually immune to over-the-counter remedies, but are still highly susceptible to benzyl alcohol, which is topically harmless to humans (and used in IV fluids, so also harmless to humans internally in certain concentrations).
5% benzyl alcohol lotion is available under the brand name Ulesfia (and maybe some other names, not sure?) in the USA, but requires a prescription. However, it is basically just benzyl alcohol mixed with creamy baby oil. (CREAMY baby oil, the thick white stuff, not the thin clear stuff. Insert inappropriate joke here.) And (again, at least in the USA) you can order benzyl alcohol in bulk online from various suppliers, and creamy baby oil from Amazon, for very cheap.
So, buy your ingredients, mix them in the proper proportions, apply for ten minutes then wash hair thoroughly. 7-10 days later do the same thing. The benzyl alcohol won't kill nits (eggs) but it will kill live lice. And the life cycle of lice is such that a 7-10 days allows the remaining viable eggs to hatch, but isn't long enough for the newly hatched lice to reach breeding age.
Now, here's the fun part. Because this stuff is cheap, you can mix up a bunch, put it in disposable plastic containers, and quietly distribute it to friends/family/classmates. Some people are really twitchy about their kid having lice (they're just bugs, people, it happens) so providing them with a free, simple solution may get them to act when the otherwise would be too embarrassed to otherwise do anything about it.
Source: my daughters' cousins kept passing lice to my kids, and we couldn't get rid of the stupid things until we passed this stuff around to pretty much our entire extended family.
Wait, what did this have to do with the origins of the moon? :)