THE SKY IS FALLING

A 14-year-old boy in Germany won a cosmic lottery of sorts last week when he was hit by a meteorite and lived to tell the tale. The pea-sized chunk of space debris sliced open the boy’s hand as it crashed to the Earth at 30,000 miles per hour, leaving a foot-long crater in the ground and a 3-inch long scar on his hand. “At first I just saw a large ball of light and then I suddenly felt a pain in my hand,” recalled Gerrit Blank. “The noise that came after the flash of light was so loud that my ears were ringing for hours afterwards. When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself in the road.” Scientists calculate that the chances of being struck by a meteorite are about one in 100 million. The only other recorded instance of a person surviving a meteor hit happened in 1954 when a meteorite crashed through the roof of a house in Alabama, bouncing off the furniture and hitting a sleeping woman. (Yahoo News)