Free Republic

If you ever find yourself at a cocktail party of astrophysicists and don't know what to say, try this: "But what about the angular momentum?" No matter what the topic of conversation, you'll be guaranteed to sound erudite. Nearly every field of astronomy, from galaxy formation to star formation, has an "angular momentum problem." Nothing in the cosmos ever seems to spin or orbit at the rate it should. The moon is no exception. It is the flywheel to end all flywheels; if its orbital angular momentum were transferred to Earth's axial rotation, our planet would come close to spinning ...

Kayla Tovo paced next to her parked car, not sure what to expect. "Mom, what are you doing?" her little boy called out the window. "Give me a minute," she answered. A decade ago, Tovo manned a machine gun for the Army in Afghanistan. Yet the meeting she was about to go to, at a park in Huntington Beach, spooked her. On the drive over she'd stopped to buy a yellow rose. A yellow rose means friendship. A yellow rose means starting over. A yellow rose would express three words to someone she'd be meeting for the first time –...