The European Space Agency has released an assessment on the recent asteroid impact over Chelyabinsk.
Quotes:
The entry speed is estimated at around 18 km/s – more than 64 000 km/h.
... the object is estimated to have been about 17 m across with a mass of 7000–10 000 tonnes when it hit atmosphere.
It exploded with a force of nearly 500 kilotons of TNT – some 30 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb – around 15–20 km above the ground.
It seems that the Mayans were only a tiny bit off in their calculations.
There are a number of common themes in the works of Jay-Z and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The two artists frequently address notions of conspicuous consumption, and both have featured New York as a backdrop to their narratives.
But could you tell a Jay-Z lyric from a line of Fitzgerald's dialogue? Take the quiz and see how well you fare.
TMZ reports that the lawsuit contains a host of other farfetched allegations, including claims that Usher sodomised the unnamed Michigan man with a firework whilst playing Katy Perry's song 'Firework'.
As well as being the day of Felix Baumgartner's momentous leap from the stratosphere, yesterday was also the 65th anniversary of Chuck Yeager becoming the first person to break the sound barrier in a manned flight. Yeager, every inch the old-school bad ass, managed to accomplish his feat with two broken ribs - which he broke by falling off a horse while hammered the night before.
Yeager, unsurprisingly in some discomfort the morning of the record-breaking flight, found that he was unable to close the hatch of the plane properly. Luckily, his mechanic supplied him a length of broomstick, which allowed Yeager, hungover and broken-ribbed as he was, to climb down from the B-29 bomber that was carrying the test plane (8,000 feet in the air), climb into the X-1 rocket plane, and close the hatch without use of the arm on his injured side. The flight went off without a hitch, and Yeager was back on terra firma in plenty of time to get sloshed once again, and crash a motorcycle in the desert in the middle of the night.
So, in honour of when men were men, and test pilots didn't allow little niggling concerns such as broken bones prevent them from entering the history books, here's a video of Joseph Kittenger's jump from a balloon at 102,800 feet on 16 August, 1960. If Kittenger's voice sounds familiar, it is because he advised on, and acted as Capsule Communicator for Baumgartner's jump.
