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The evidence for this mystery space rock comes from a diamond-studded meteor that exploded over Sudan in 2008. NASA had spotted the 9-ton (8,200 kilograms), 13-foot (4 meters) meteor heading toward the planet well before impact, and researchers showed up in the Sudanese desert to collect an unusually rich haul of remains. Now, a new study of one of those meteorites suggests that the meteor may have broken off of a giant asteroid — one more or less the size of the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. The meteorite harbored an unusual suite of minerals...

STRANGE ASTEROID: Newly-discovered asteroid 2009 BD is slowly passing by Earth today only 400,000 miles away. The small 10m-wide space rock poses no threat, but it merits attention anyway. The orbit of 2009 BD appears to be almost identical to the orbit of Earth. 2009 BD may be a rare co-orbital asteroid, circling the sun in near-tandem with our planet. Extrapolating the motion of 2009 BD into the future, we see that it remains in the vicinity of Earth for many months to come, never receding farther than 0.1 AU (9.3 million miles) until Nov. 2010. Future observations may reveal...

When an asteroid was spotted heading towards our planet last October, researchers rushed to document a cosmic impact from start to finish for the first time. Roberta Kwok tells the tale.Around midnight on 6 October 2008, a white dot flitted across the screen of Richard Kowalski's computer at an observatory atop Mount Lemmon in Arizona. Kowalski had seen hundreds of such dots during three and a half years of scanning telescope images for asteroids that might hit Earth or come close. He followed the object through the night and submitted the coordinates, as usual, to the Minor Planet Center in...

The University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is launching its Fall 2009 Evening Lecture Series with talks on wandering solar system planets and searches for hazardous asteroids from Mount Lemmon... Planetary sciences professor Renu Malhotra will speak on "Migrating Planets" on Tuesday, Sept. 15. [whoops] Did the solar system always look the way it is now? New studies by Malhotra and others find that the outer planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -- were more tightly clustered in the early solar system, then moved away from each other. Malhotra's models show that as the solar system evolved, Jupiter...

...Last night (Sunday, October 5th), a telescope on Mount Lemmon, Arizona, detected a tiny moving blip, the signature of a small chunk of rock moving rapidly through space. Twenty-five observations have been done since then by professional and amateur astronomers around the world, and the object's orbit has been pinned down with fairly high precision. It is almost certain to hit Earth's atmosphere around 10:46 p.m. EDT tonight, October 6th. (That's 2:46 a.m. October 7th, Greenwich Mean Time.) The rock is roughly 10 feet (3 meters) across, and it's expected to enter the atmosphere above northern Sudan at about 8...

A space rock a few metres across exploded over northern Sudan early in the morning of Tuesday 7 October. The small asteroid mostly disintegrated when it collided with Earth's atmosphere, but fragments may have reached the surface. Such an event happens roughly every three months. But this is "the first time we were able to discover and predict an impact before the event", says Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object (NEO) programme at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. Incoming! The story began on Sunday evening, when astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona, discovered...

Two very interesting links below. Ethiopia reports record volcanic eruption First paragraph: "A volcano in Ethiopia's northeastern Afar region erupted on Monday, researchers said Wednesday, prompting a minor earthquake and record lava flows covering 300 square kilometres (115 square miles)." Meteosat-8 Rapid Scan captures asteroid impact First paragraph: "On 7 October, asteroid 2008 TC3 entered the atmosphere over northern Sudan and exploded. Amazingly, the Meteosat-8 Rapid Scanning Service managed to capture the impact."

Just before dawn on Oct. 7, 2008, an SUV-sized asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere and exploded harmlessly over the Nubian Desert of northern Sudan. Scientists expected the asteroid, called 2008 TC3, had blown to dust in the resulting high-altitude fireball. What happened next excited the scientific community. Peter Jenniskens, a meteor astronomer with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who works at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., joined Muawia Shaddad of the University of Khartoum in Sudan to search for possible extraterrestrial remnants from the asteroid. A paper, featured as the cover story in the March 26...

AN asteroid discovered today will hit Earth's atmosphere over Sudan in a few hours but will burn up before it can hit the ground or endanger aircraft, astronomers say. The asteroid would create a large fireball about 10.46pm EDT (1.46pm AEST) as it burns up, a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said. "We want to stress that this object is not a threat," said Timothy Spahr, director of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center at Harvard in Massachusetts. "We're excited since this is the first time we have issued a prediction that an object will enter Earth's...

AN asteroid discovered today will hit Earth's atmosphere over Sudan in a few hours -SNIP- The asteroid would create a large fireball about 10.46pm EDT (1.46pm AEST) as it burns up, a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said. "We want to stress that this object is -SNIP- a threat," said Timothy Spahr, director of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center at Harvard in Massachusetts. "We're excited since this is the first time we have issued a prediction that an object will enter Earth's atmosphere," Dr Spahr said. The asteroid, known as a meteoroid, -SNIP- "A typical meteor...

A mini asteroid collided safely with Sudan this week, but mega disaster looms with nearly 1000 hazardous near-Earth objects roaming our universe—plus even more dangerous ones we haven't spotted yet. With no response plan for the worst-case scenario in place anywhere on Earth, four-time shuttle astronaut Thomas D. Jones offers a call to arms against the coming cosmic storm. Early last Monday, Richard Kowalski, a University of Arizona astronomer at the Catalina Sky Survey team's 60-in. search telescope atop Mt. Lemmon near Tucson, flashed word to NASA of the discovery of a new Near Earth Object (NEO). The small asteroid,...

The Nigerian government has denied it gave ransom money to free dozens of children and staff taken from a catholic school by Boko Haram jihadists. The kidnapping occurred back in November in north-central Niger state. It was one of the country’s largest mass abductions Nigeria’s government made the comments in response to an AFP investigation released on Tuesday stating that the government funnelled a ‘huge’ ransom of millions of dollars to the jihadist group. According to the report, the government also freed two commanders from the jihadist group. Nigeria’s information minister insisted that the student’s release was due to ‘professional...

Decolonization in Action - They Ruined my Country! serpentza https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0sbFFvVyx8 He shows urban images of South Africa 10-13 years ago and what it looks like today.

At a remote and barren Sahara desert site in Niger, scientists have unearthed fossils of a new species of Spinosaurus, among the biggest of the meat-eating dinosaurs, notable for its large blade-shaped head crest and jaws bearing interlocking teeth for snaring slippery fish. It prowled a forested inland environment and strode into rivers to catch sizable fish like a modern-day wading bird — a “hell heron,” as one of the researchers put it, considering it was about 40 feet long and weighed 5-7 tons. The dinosaur presented a striking profile on the Cretaceous Period landscape of Africa some 95 million...

Violet Zulu sits in a two-room home in Lusaka with no running water, trying to rebuild her life at twenty-six. She earns about forty dollars a month cleaning houses. She begs for food at times so her two little boys can eat. Her partner abandoned her when she became pregnant a third time. She told reporters, “I never wanted to abort my pregnancy, but it is the circumstances at home that forced me to do it.” That sentence breaks the heart. She did not crave abortion. She feared hunger. She loved her sons and believed that another child would starve...

Initially, archaeologists believed that humans began to live with cats about 9,500 years ago in... parts of the present-day eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. This timeline coincides with the beginning of the Neolithic era, when agriculture started to spread. The grains used in farming attracted rodents, which then enticed the wildcats to come and eat the rodents. Neolithic humans then likely kept the wildcats around to keep the rodents away, paving the way for domestication. Cat remains dating [circa 9500 years ago] have been discovered in present-day Cyprus, indicating that the animals were a part of daily life by then.Cats...

Their revolution could soon be coming to an end. January 3, 2026. Caracas. 2:47 AM. The helicopters had come in low over the Caribbean, running dark. The Delta Force operators on board were well-rehearsed. By 3:29 AM, it was over. Thirty-two Cuban bodyguards lay dead in the compound. Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were in flex cuffs, hustled onto a transport aircraft bound for New York. At Mar-a-Lago, President Trump watched the operation unfold in real time with his national security team. It was January 3—exactly 36 years to the day since American forces had extracted military dictator Manuel...

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — The United States is sending troops to Nigeria to help train the West African nation's military in fighting extremism, Nigerian authorities said Wednesday, as a multifaceted security crisis spreads in the north of the country.The American personnel won't engage in combat or have a direct operational role, and Nigerian forces will have complete command authority, Maj. Gen. Samaila Uba, spokesman for Nigeria’s Defense Headquarters, said in a statement.“At the invitation of the Government of Nigeria and in continuation of our longstanding security cooperation and military-to-military partnership with the United States, Nigeria will host a contingent of...

Kenyans were lured to Russia by job promises, then forcibly conscripted into its army for Ukraine under death threats, made to sign military contracts. In Ukraine, these recruits faced apocalyptic combat, drone attacks, severe injuries, and death, labelled 'cannon fodder' due to Russia's high casualties. A Kenyan recruitment agency employee faces human trafficking charges; hundreds of Kenyans sent to fight highlight Russia's exploitation of African economic desperation.

The mayhem started an hour before sunset on Tuesday as residents of the farming community were heading home from their fields, where they grow yams, maize and millet. The militants headed straight to the home of traditional leader Umar Bio Salihu - because they had written to him asking if they could come and preach... Salihu was not at his home in Woro at the time, so they set his compound alight and killed two of his children. ... The jihadists then went on a killing spree that lasted all night. Amnesty International said many of the dead had been...