Possible Meteorite Chelyabinsk

Russians Pull Chelyabinsk Meteorite From Lake, Promptly Break It

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Divers working in Lake Chebarkul in central Russia have pulled up a 1,255 lb. (570 kg) chunk of rock they suspect is the meteorite that wreaked havoc above Chelyabinsk earlier this year. But as they were putting it on the scale, it collapsed into three different pieces.

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To date, scientists have uncovered more than 12 fragments from the lake. If confirmed, however, this particular piece would be the largest yet recovered. It sat at a depth of 42 feet (13 m), below a 20-foot-wide (6 m) gaping hole in the ice above it.

According to BBC reports, live footage showed a team pulling out a 5-foot long (1.5 m) rock from the lake after wrapping it in a special covering and placing it on a metal sheet while it was still underwater. The fragment broke up into at least three large pieces as it was lifted from the ground with the help of levers and ropes.

Scientists caution that it'll take some time before they can verify that this rock is indeed the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk on February 15th.

YES: they did it. Chelyabinsk is here!!!

Hole in Lake Chebarkul's Ice Cover Left by Meteorite Landing, February 2013 

Andrey Orlov viaRussia Today

Divers have hauled a 570-kilogram-plus (1,257 pounds) hunk of meteorite from Lake Chebarkul in the Urals region of Russia. The rock seems to be a piece of the meteorite that landed in the country this February. The fragment was so large it: 1) broke into three pieces during removal and 2) broke the scale scientists used to weigh it, once the scale reached the 570-kilogram mark.

This is the largest-yet bit of the meteorite divers have been able to recover from Lake Chebarkul, RT reports. Experts the BBC and RT talked with confirmed the rock was extraterrestrial in origin. Scientists will now analyze its mineral content. It's been packed off to a local natural history museum, so perhaps it'll go on display soon.

The dive seems to be part of an ongoing effort to pull meteorite pieces out of the lake for study. Divers previously recovered 12 rocks from the lake, but scientists confirmed only five of those were actually meteorite fragments, RT reports.

The meteor that exploded over Russia's Chelyabinsk region in February weighed 11,000 tons in total, injured 1,600 people and caused $31 million in damages, RT reports. When it finally plunged into Lake Chebarkul, it left a large hole in the lake's ice cover.

The First-Known Comet to Strike Earth

Terry Bakker

A black, diamond-spackled pebble just a few centimeters across is the remainder of a comet that struck Earth almost 29 million years ago—making it the first direct evidence of a comet exploding in our atmosphere, scientists say. The stone, which the scientists named “Hypatia” after an Alexandrine mathematician and philosopher, was found in 1996 among tumbled bits of yellow sand glass (also known as the Libyan Desert Glass) scattered across tens of kilometers in southwestern Egypt, near the border with Libya. The glass itself, one large polished piece of which has a prominent place in a necklace that belonged to Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen, has been dated to 28.5 million years and has long been thought to be the result of a meteorite impact or an airburst caused by a comet breaking up in Earth’s atmosphere. To determine its origin, scientists performed a range of tests on the tiny pebble, examining its mineralogy, bulk chemistry, carbon isotope, and noble gas content. The stone’s noble gas content supports an extraterrestrial origin, while the presence of tiny diamonds—larger than nanodiamonds found in a common kind of meteorite called chondrites, but similar in size to diamond aggregates known to be formed by impacts—supports a cometary origin. The stone is also markedly carbon-rich, more so than other known extraterrestrial material aside from comets, the researchers will report in an upcoming issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters. All of this, they say, points to a cometlike object entering Earth’s atmosphere, where it exploded, cooking the desert sand below to 2000°C and forming the Libyan Desert Glass.

source: Science (link: http://news.sciencemag.org/earth/2013/10/scienceshot-first-known-comet-strike-earth)

Where Should I Drink My Whiskey?

Alexey Lysenko/Shutterstock

Don’t like whiskey? Maybe you need to speak to your favorite bar about improving its interior design. A new study finds that the environment in which people sip a whiskey influences how they perceived certain aspects of the beverage and even changes how much they liked it, researchers report today in the journal Flavour. The team invited more than 400 participants to a tasting event where they sipped a glass of Scotch in three environments carefully designed to correlate with different characteristics of the whiskey: the grassiness of its aroma, the sweetness of its taste, and the woodiness of its aftertaste. Each room was even outfitted with a custom scent designed by a professional perfumer to evoke the intended quality. Lo and behold, the tasters ranked the whiskey as “grassier” when sitting in lawn chairs among potted plants, “sweeter” when sniffing a sugary scent before a bowl of berries, and “woodier” when savoring the beverage surrounded by wood paneling and listening to a soundtrack of a crackling fire—even though they knew they were drinking the same whiskey the whole time. What’s more, the tasters reported enjoying the whiskey the most when they drank it in the “woody” room. No word on which kind of environment to choose if you just want to throw a couple back.

source: Science

Were Most Cave Paintings Done by Women?

Pedro Saura/AFP/GettyImages/Newscom

Some handprints accompanying the most famous ancient cave paintings of ice age mammals such as horses and mammoths—long attributed to males—may have actually belonged to women. That’s the conclusion of a new study, in which a researcher compared the silhouettes of 32 handprints found next to 12,500- to 40,000-year-old cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain. Many of the prints, possibly one of the first forms of artist’s signature, are small, which has led some scientists to infer that the art was painted by adolescent males. But the new work, reported this month in American Antiquity, concludes that 24 of the hands belonged to females, based on both the length of the hand and fingers as well as the ratios of lengths of the index finger, ring finger, and little finger. Of the eight remaining handprints, only three depict the hands of adult males; the rest are of adolescent males. It’s likely that each of the hands stenciled on the cave walls—such as these in El Castillo cave in Spain—belong to the artist, not a model, the researcher contends. For one thing, the caves are typically small, so two people would probably have had trouble fitting into the small space together. Also, more than three-fourths of the hands depicted are left hands, which is the most likely one to be stenciled by a right-handed artist.

Source: science