Humongous exploding fireball in sky probably a meteor, say scientists ( video)

For many people in Nevada and northern California,?Sunday morning?was disrupted by a sonic boom and a fireball streaking across the sky. ? ?

A thunderous boom accompanied by a greenish fireball hurtling across the sky shattered the morning tranquility of many residents of?Nevada and northern California on Sunday.?

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According to the Associated Press, the?unannounced?pyrotechnics prompted a flood of 911 calls in both states.

"It made the shades in my room shake hard enough to slam into the window a couple times," ?one Reno, Nev.,?resident, who initially thought it was an earthquake, told the AP.?

"It knocked me off my feet and was shaking the house," said a mother in?Arnold, Calif., who said she heard a booming sound at about 8 a.m. "It sounded like it was next door."

Those who happened to be looking at the sky say they saw a blazing light hurtling across the sky.?

It is an event that makes you glad to be alive," Matthew Neal of San Francisco told the AP. "The main body was bright green and the head was bright red and white."

The fireball, which was visible in towns some 600 miles apart, was almost certainly what astronomers call a bolide, an exceptionally bright meteor. The loud crack was likely a sonic boom caused by the meteor's shockwave.

SPACE.com's?Denise Chow quotes?Bill Cooke, the head of NASA's Meteoroid Environments Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., who estimated that the meteor was moving at about?33,500 mph, weighed more than 150,000 lbs., and was roughly the size of a minivan. The energy released by the meteor as it entered the atmosphere was equivalent to about a fourth of the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, he said.

No crater or debris has yet been found.?

The bolide came during the peak of the Lyrid meteor shower, which occurs annually as the earth passes through the icy tail of Comet Thatcher. Cooke told SPACE.com that it was unlikely that the two phenomena were related, but that he would not rule it out.

In any case, this meteor was probably composed of stuff much, much denser than ice.

Bolides are rare, but not completely unheard of. At about 10 p.m. on April 14, 2010, the night sky over southern Wisconsin turned to day as a meteor exploded in the atmosphere. NASA later estimated the size of that meteor to be about 3.3 feet in diameter. The following August, residents in Alabama spotted a fireball caused by a meteor moving at a whopping?134,000 mph.?

The study of meteors in the United States began with a spectacular bolide. On December 14, 1807, residents of Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut spotted what one observer called a "globe of fire"?barreling?through the sky. Fragments were recovered in Weston, Conn., marking some of the earliest evidence that shooting stars were caused by rocks from space.?

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The 10 Biggest Mistakes Made With Amazon Web Services

amazon web servicesAmazon Web Services (AWS) provides an excellent cloud infrastructure solution for both early stage startups and enterprises.?The good news is that AWS is a pay-per-use service, provides universal access to state-of-the-art computing resources, and scales with the growing needs of a business.?The bad news ? AWS can be very hard for early stage companies to onboard, while enterprises usually spend too much time with ?busy work? to optimize AWS and keep costs under control. We launched a private beta of ?KnowYourCloud Analytics? a tool that helps AWS users to get to the bottom of their AWS cloud. By gathering data streams from multiple compute resources and crunching this data with its state-of-the-art analytics engine, Newvem enables AWS users to discover potential cost savings, identify security vulnerabilities and gain more control over availability.

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Real-Time Research: iOS Dominates Over Android When It Comes To Usage, Says Chitika

chitika pie chartAndroid, by most accounts, is proving to be the most popular smartphone platform when it comes to devices getting sold today -- partly due to the sheer variety of devices and price points that are out there. But a new research tool that tracks usage in real-time shows that when it comes to usage, consumers, in the U.S. at least, are far more active on Apple's devices than on any other. The numbers come from the ad network Chitika, which notes that in the last 24 hours, iOS devices, covering the iPhone, iPad and iPod models, accounted for just under 68 percent of all usage on its network. Android, meanwhile, accounted for just under 28 percent. And other platforms were less than five percent of all activity. But there have been periods in the last few days when Android accounted for as little as 19 percent of traffic (on April 19, as it happens).

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Galaxy S III teased on Samsung Denmark Facebook page

Samsung teaser

By now we've heard plenty of rumored details, though nothing confirmed, about what Samsung's going to be showing off on May 3 in London. And today the plot thickens somewhat with the unveiling of a new teaser image on an official Facebook page. The manufacturer's uploaded the image you see above to its Danish Facebook gallery, showing the date and time (in Denmark) of the Galaxy S III new Galaxy launch event. Over on the right is the unmistakable outline of a curved smartphone, similar to the Galaxy Nexus. The profile of the device is different to what we've seen in recent leaked images, suggesting those units may indeed have been Galaxy S III hardware in generic dummy cases, as has been reported.

No clues as to what, if anything, that plus sigh is all about. But if you have any wild theories, be sure to shout out in the comments.

It's coming, folks. And we've no doubt the next couple of weeks will be packed with more rumors and speculation (and maybe a fresh leak or two), as we await Samsung's next big thing. Keep watching AC for all the latest.

Source: Samsung Denmark Facebook

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Polaris' pool-cleaning robots get updated with added intelligence, four-wheel drive

Polaris' pool-cleaning robots get updated with added intelligence, four-wheel drive

It's been almost exactly a year since Zodiac Pool Systems last expanded its line of Polaris-branded pool-cleaning robots, and it's now back with two more additions that fill out the top and bottom end of its lineup. That includes the company's most advanced robot to date, the $1499 Polaris 9400 Sport (pictured above), which adds four-wheel drive for the first time, as well as the company's new accelerometer-enhanced ActivMotion Sensor technology -- something Polaris says allows the robot to continually sense where it is in the pool and optimize its cleaning action accordingly. The 9100 Sport, on the other hand, gets neither of those new additions, but it'll "only" set you back $799, and will still clean pools up to 40 feet long in about two hours. You can get a closer look at those, as well as the company's existing offerings, at the source link below.

Continue reading Polaris' pool-cleaning robots get updated with added intelligence, four-wheel drive

Polaris' pool-cleaning robots get updated with added intelligence, four-wheel drive originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 21 Apr 2012 07:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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