> an asteroid potentially as large as Mars

Note that the USA Today article actually says "NASA wants to know whether the asteroid ... could be part of what was an earlier planet perhaps as large as Mars". The asteroid itself it nowhere nears as large as Mars (about 2800x smaller by mass).

How is this guy not a James Bond villain?

Yeah, I gotta agree with this posting and that in http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=250801&c id=19876195. There's all this talk about the "first virus" for PCs being in 1982, but I remember them from before. I ran into a nasty one in 1980-81. It resided in the unused bytes of DOS, and would alter the prologue bytes of the sectors to non-standard values. Once infected, the disk could only be read by the infected DOS, which would install itself onto any new disks subsequently inserted in the drive.