Gift idea: Mini Museums, Spanish crater, 30k near-Earth asteroids

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The holidays are coming. If you’re looking for a sciencey gift for the cool nerd in your life — which may, admittedly, be you — then here’s something I highly recommend: A Mini Museum.

I’ve written about these before: They are a parallelepiped (specifically a rectangular cuboid) of clear plastic measuring about 10 x 7 x 2.5 centimeters in size, embedded in which are cool things like chips from dinosaur bones, interesting rocks and minerals, and even historical bits like a splinter of brick from the Cavern Club where the Beatles played in the 1960s.

They are literally museums you can hold in your hand. The Mini Museum folks sent me one as a gift back in 2018 and I love it. Seriously, it’s very cool, and the book that comes with it describes all the specimens and gives their significance. The Third Edition version has 29 objects in it, and if you’re anything like me you’ll really like it. As would any science geek in your life.

I’ve partnered with them this season to get y’all a 10% discount on anything you purchase on their site. Load up the cart, and when you get to the part asking for a discount code, enter BADASTRO. Boom. Your cost is decimated (in the literal sense).

Note: This offer is good starting now (Monday, November 14, 2022) through Thanksgiving (November 24, 2022).

In return, I get a small percentage from all sales, which will help support me and my writing and my ability to live and eat and such.

Start your shopping here!

At this point some of you may be questioning my sincerity in endorsing this product due to a potential conflict of interest. Understandable! But here’s the key thing to understand: I only endorse stuff I really like. I get offers pretty often asking me to sell something or another in the newsletter or on social media, and I turn the vast majority of them down. I don’t want to endorse something I personally wouldn’t want, and certainly not something I haven’t tried or seen for myself. Sure I have my reputation to consider, but more than that I try to live up to Wheaton’s Law, so I don’t want to screw anybody over. If I say something is cool, then I mean it.

Mini Museums are cool.

They also have a lot of other really fun items at their store too (Martian meteorites! Chelyabinsk meteorites! Apollo 11 Command Module Foil!), so feel free to poke around and see what might tickle your science fancy. I bet you know more than one nerd.

Enjoy! Happy holiday hunting!

News Cues

I choose a few to imbue clued views

Scientists have found what may be the first impact crater ever discovered in Spain. Only about 200 such craters are known on Earth — they erode over time, making them difficult to detect — so finding one is a big deal. In this case a depression in the ground in southeastern Spain was at first thought to be a basin filled with ancient sediment, detected by the change in gravity of the region (yes, we can map where the Earth’s crust is more and less dense using gravity).

Closer inspection, however, revealed evidence of an impact: The kinds of broken and re-cemented rocks called breccias common to asteroid impact sites and which in this case have grains in them that formed under immense pressure; as shocked quartz, where the mineral has been hit by a blast so powerful it distorts the crystal structure; and huge blocks of rocks that could the result of ejected material that gets spun around by the impact [link to presentation of the science].

The initial crater is some 4 kilometers across and probably formed about 8 million years ago. It has yet to be confirmed, but to my eye this looks like it was an impact event Pretty cool.

My thanks to the lead scientist on this, Dr. Sebastián Tomas Sanchez Gomez, for explaining to me how the crater was initially found.

Speaking of impacts…

Astronomers have reached a new kilometerstone: They recently discovered the 30,000th Near Earth Asteroid, or NEA. That’s a lot of space rocks. These asteroids are discovered by a host of observatories across and above the planet, scanning the skies to look for blips of light moving against the background stars. Most have orbits that keep them safely away from Earth, but some get to within about 45 million kilometers — still pretty far away, but if they get that close they’re classified as NEAs. If they get within 7.5 million km of us and are larger than 140 meters in diameter they are called Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, because they have a higher chance of hitting us, and at that size can do serious damage (a bit fewer than 1,500 of those 30,000 have a non-zero chance of hitting us, but even the highest-risk rock still has a very low chance of impact).

If this sounds scary, I get it. But the good news is they’re out there whether we look or not, and we are finding them. Even better, we’re testing ways to deflect them should one be headed a little to close for comfort toward us. I’ll also add that no known asteroid is predicted to impact us for the next century at least. Of course, there may yet be ones out there we haven’t spotted, but given that half the current total of NEAs have been found in the past six years, we’re getting very good at finding them indeed. I think that’s good news.

Et alia

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