The Boston Globe: In a basement laboratory on Oxford Street, Harvard scientists seeking insight into Mars are shooting metal discs down a 20-foot-long gun barrel, pulverizing slivers of ice and rock.

"It is a very destructive way of doing science," said Sarah T. Stewart, the director of the Harvard Shock Compression Laboratory, who uses an oversized rifle to recreate the shockwaves that reverberate through a planet when a meteor crashes down.

Slamming objects together may seem more child's fantasy than laboratory life, but such brief, cataclysmic experiments can give researchers insight into everything from how materials hold up under extreme conditions to the chemistry of other worlds.