Word: meteoric
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Nothing could be further from the truth. The risk of HIV transmission from a dining hall worker to a student through the food the student eats is over one trillion times less than the chance of being struck by lightning, hit by a meteor or dying of frostbite in the summer. Of the estimated 10 million. HIV Positive people worldwide, not a single one was infected with HIV by ingesting contaminated food. In fact, it is not even believed to be theoretically; possible...
...Princeton, he was convinced that it had been pockmarked not by explosive volcanism, as many geologists then thought, but by asteroid impacts. If that was true, he felt, Earth, a much larger target, must have been heavily bombarded too. For his Ph.D. thesis, Shoemaker prepared a & geologic map of Meteor Crater in Arizona, and in the process confirmed that it had resulted from an impact...
Luckily, planet and comet have never been in the same place at the same time. The only visible effect of the crossed paths is the annual Perseid meteor shower, caused when lingering comet dust burns up in the earth's atmosphere. But humanity may not be so lucky for long: there is a chance that the next time Swift-Tuttle comes around, probably in the year 2126, it will fall to earth. The odds are small -- 10,000 to 1 against -- according to the International Astronomical Union's Brian Marsden. But the downside is so great that Marsden has urged...
EVERY AUGUST, COMET SWIFT-TUTTLE LEAVES A spectacular calling card. The trail of dust it sheds on its journey around the sun intersects Earth's orbit and flares into the Perseid meteor shower. The comet itself last appeared in 1862, and based on the orbit calculated at that time, it should have showed up again between 1979 and 1983. It didn...
Wang next produced a study of the 1987 angular solar eclipse. This study revealed the presence of a shadow on the moon's side which Wang correctly identified as an Orientale Basin, an indentation created by a meteor...