[Tangentially– for a high(er) score on the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) aptitude test, one needs the vocabulary of William F. Buckley.]

add this one to your list….
“Enantiomers”
Breaking Bad
https://youtu.be/7ocJK5ob73A
1:04
“Methamphetamine has a chiral center, the molecule contains a carbon atom attached to four different atoms or groups at about 104 degrees from each other. In addition, the molecule has only one chiral center; if it had a pair of centers along with an internal plane of symmetry, it would not be an enantiomer. The dextrorotatory(+) form of methamphetamine affects the central nervous system by releasing dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine, but its levorotatory(-) enantiomer merely acts as a rarely prescribed nasal decongestant.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(chemistry)

This has been in my list of “Words” for a few years as I didn’t know it existed prior to my discovering it.
Also, having lived in a “right-hand world” its nice to know the core of our live here is left handed

Left-Handers of the World Unite!!

Looking at numbers (well, at Wikipedia) and at the asteroids themselves, Ceres has a diameter of 945 km and Vesta about half of that; they seem to be fairly solid objects. For comparison, Ryugu has an approximate diameter of one km, and Bennu about half a km.

So it seems reasonable (now, anyhow) to think that small asteroids are apt to be rubble piles and really big asteroids something pretty well held together like planets, and in-between asteroids are likely in between from a standpoint of cohesiveness. So then we turn to the Chicxulub impact crater. Which is said to be 150 km in diameter and 20 km deep, presumably after some upwelling. And the impactor itself is guesstimated to have been somewhere between 10 and 80 km in diameter — somewhere between a thousand times the size of Ryugu and a half million times.

So maybe that was a pretty solid object, all by itself. Or maybe it was a really big rubble pile, or maybe it was 80 km across as an approaching rubble pile asteroid which had a 10 km solid core at the actual point of impact but which scattered the great bulk of its mass (500 times that of the core) over half the face of earth.

Too hard to say! At least to say definitely. OTOH, if the Chicxulub asteroid had disintegrated and spread most of its mass all over the earth we’d probably have a whole lot sizable 66 million year old craters to look at. But we’ve got smallish craters of that age and the monster off Yucatan, which suggests the piece of asteroid which struck there was indeed the biggest single piece.

Also, we can reflect that an oncoming asteroid has a certain amount of kinetic energy set by its initial (outside the atmosphere) mass and relative velocity, which is mostly transformed into heat when it strikes the earth — and when it weighs a trillion tons, it doesn’t much matter whether that asteroid comes down in one piece or a couple quadrillion. So the solidity of the Chicxulub impact body may not have been that big an issue — it dumped a lot of heat into a smallish area really quickly and that could have been enough to create world-changing weather effects, leading to plant and animal extinctions and climatic disturbance.

That said, I’m still mumbling about the Deccan lava traps.

If the common C-type asteroids were previously assumed to be solid and are actually less damaging rubble piles, then I wonder if the theory and mechanism of the famous Cretaceous extinction has to be revisited. Unless, of course, the science is already settled ;)

Lee S: You must remember that if a big rubble pile hits the Earth, the data now tells us that 90% will not make it to the surface, and the 10% that does will likely be a lot of smaller boulders. The damage will be nowhere be as serious as the size of the asteroid implies.

In other words, I’d much rather see a rubble pile impact than a solid rock.