Washington, September 18 (ANI): In a very rare finding, scientists have discovered an unusual kind of meteorite in the Western Australian desert and have uncovered that it came from the innermost main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Meteorites are the only surviving physical record of the formation of our Solar System.
However, information about where individual meteorites originated, and how they were moving around the Solar System prior to falling to Earth, is available for only a dozen of around 1100 documented meteorite falls over the past two hundred years.
According to Dr Phil Bland from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, the lead author of the study, “We are incredibly excited about our new finding. Meteorites are the most analysed rocks on Earth, but it’s really rare for us to be able to tell where they came from.”
The new meteorite, which is about the size of cricket ball, is the first to be retrieved since researchers from Imperial College London, Ondrejov Observatory in the Czech Republic, and the Western Australian Museum, set up a trial network of cameras in the Nullarbor Desert in Western Australia in 2006.
The researchers aim to use these cameras to find new meteorites, and work out where in the Solar System they came from, by tracking the fireballs that they form in the sky.
The new meteorite was found on the first day of searching using the new network, by the first search expedition, within 100m of the predicted site of the fall.
The meteorite appears to have been following an unusual orbit, or path around the Sun, prior to falling to Earth in July 2007, according to the researchers’ calculations.
The team believes that it started out as part of an asteroid in the innermost main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
It then gradually evolved into an orbit around the Sun that was very similar to Earth’s.
The new meteorite is also unusual because it is composed of a rare type of basaltic igneous rock.
According to the researchers, its composition, together with the data about where the meteorite comes from, fits with a recent theory about how the building blocks for the terrestrial planets were formed.
This theory suggests that the igneous parent asteroids for meteorites like today’s formed deep in the inner Solar System, before being scattered out into the main asteroid belt.
Asteroids are widely believed to be the building blocks for planets like the Earth, so the new finding provides another clue about the origins of the Solar System. (ANI)
Secret sex-message codes used by teens that parents should know of
Washington, May 23 (ANI): Do you see red if your teenage kid is texting “8″? If not, then it’s time you should know that this humble numerical message actually means that your child is suggesting oral sex, according to a new list by NetLingo.com.
Titled ‘Top 50 Text Acronyms Parents Should Know’, the list compiled by contains terms that are completely unknown to most people, teenaged or otherwise.
“I swear, I’ve used the Internet for 13 years, and still insist half of this stuff is either made up or never used,” Fox News quoted a commenter on online aggregator site Digg as saying.
And a cell-phone expert- Sascha Segan of PC Magazine-agrees: “I honestly have to say I have never seen most of these terms. It looks like a lot of them come from online sex chat rooms, and not just any chat rooms, but sadomasochistic ones.”
Some of the very specific terms on the list, even include terms like “NIFOC” that means “Nude In Front Of The Computer”, and “ILF/MD” that apparently means “I Love Female/Male Dominance”.
NetLingo.com is a Web site devoted to collating and explaining online jargon, and had compiled the list only a couple of years back, and each term listed there clicks through to a page indicating its origin.
“This is stuff that’s being used all across the Internet, in instant messaging, in chat rooms, in text messaging. There are spikes in the amount of usage for each acronym, and regional variations,” said Erin Jansen, founder of NetLingo.com.
While Jansen’s not claiming that every teenager is using each acronym, ut she insists that all of them are things that parents should be aware of.
“It’s a good overview of what parents ought to be aware of, even if their kids aren’t going to these weird chat rooms, because kids pick them up anyway. It’s like when I was young and my friends and I looked up dirty words in the dictionary,” Jansen says.
Segan, however, isn’t convinced that a middle-school-aged teen would soon be fluent in bondage terminology.
However, some of the terms are accurate, chiefly the ones having to do with the presence of parents in the room, or “parent or mom over shoulder”.
“CD9, POS, MOS-those are real. But a lot of the other stuff is just laughably out of date,” he said.
NetLingo.com does have a longer list of commonly used text terms, which is more useful.
“That’s the one parents should be looking at. If parents don’t know those, it doesn’t mean they’re old-it just means they’re not tuned into Internet culture,” said Segan. (ANI)