Last week a young man was playing basketball in a gym somewhere in the US when a lightning storm started. He and his friends went outside to look, and he was hit by a bolt of lightning on the side of his face–it exited from his ankle, and he lived to tell the tale on NBC’s Today show.
A similar tale, this time starring a meteorite, happened recently in Germany. The headline screams about a meteorite travelling 30,000 miles per hour. Read the story itself, which explains why the youth survived such a fast meteor. Hint: Size matters. (P.S. I always thought that a rock falling from space was a “meteor” until it hit the ground, at which point it magically transmogrified into a “meteorite”.)