Instead she is sticking them in a particle accelerator and bombarding them with heavy ions-large atoms that have been stripped down to their nuclei by the removal of their electrons.
While the rate of asteroid collisions experienced by early Earth generally declined over time, it may have spiked some 3.9bn years ago during a postulated event known as the Late Heavy Bombardment (lhb).
Professor David Hinde, of the Australian National University, says a beam of calcium-48 nuclei, coming from an accelerator, flies into a scattering chamber where it hits atoms of berkelium-249.
The UN mission in eastern Congo said its helicopters bombarded M23 positions in the town of Kibumba on Saturday, after the rebels launched an offensive there with heavy weapons.
A shaky truce in the besieged Palestinian refugee camp in Yarmouk on the outskirts of Damascus has broken down after the warring sides exchanged shelling and gunfire.
He suggested that perhaps life had been brought to our planet by meteorites, bombarding the Earth's surface and seeding it with the building blocks of life.