Strange but true

Q.  A meteor is headed for Earth!  Is it coming your way?
A.  One night, says astronomer Bob Berman in “Secrets of the Night Sky,” an alarmed woman called his observatory to report a fiery ball slashing across the heavens, lighting up the countryside.  “Probably just a meteor, nothing unusual,” he told her.  But 100 miles away people spotted the same bright light, and it wasn’t moving.  The only way a meteor can appear stationary is if it’s coming right at you!Most visible shooting stars are the size of apple seeds, and of the 100 million that enter our atmosphere each day at speeds fifty times greater than a rifle bullet, nearly all disintegrate into dust.  Not so the particular one in question.  The grapefruit-sized, six-pound meteor crashed through a houseroof in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and after bouncing a few times between carpet and ceiling, came to rest harmlessly under the dining room table.Ironically, the location of the previous house hit by a shooting star was again Wethersfield, eleven years earlier, and barely a mile away. Q.  Some animals carry around their own parachute in case of falls.  Who is among this foresightful set?
A.  Rats and mice, along with their smaller animal brethren.  “Terminal velocity” is the key.A skydiver jumping out of a plane accelerates to around 160 mph, depending on body weight and positioning, then goes no faster.  Small animals have more surface area for their weight, so in falling they generate more air resistance and peak at a much slower speed, with their body acting as a built-in parachute.A mouse can fall several thousand feet onto a hard surface and suffer little more than a daze, points out J. B. S. Haldane in his essay “On Being the Right Size.”  A rat can fall out of an 11th-story skyscraper window, then go on about its business.  A much longer drop than that would probably do in the rat, but creatures smaller than mice can plunge from very great heights and go virtually unfazed.

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