Meteor explodes over Russian Urals

The world is safe at least from one asteroid.
A 150-foot (46-meter) cosmic rock hurtled safely past Earth on Friday.
It was the closest known flyby for a rock of its size, passing within 17,000 miles (27,357 kilometers). That's closer than some satellites.People in Chelyabinsk, the region hardest hit by the meteorite that slammed Russia on Friday morning, have a tough-guy reputation, pumped up in recent years by a popular TV skit show. Twitter feeds in the hours following landfall ke...more »

The world is safe at least from one asteroid.
A 150-foot (46-meter) cosmic rock hurtled safely past Earth on Friday.
It was the closest known flyby for a rock of its size, passing within 17,000 miles (27,357 kilometers). That's closer than some satellites.People in Chelyabinsk, the region hardest hit by the meteorite that slammed Russia on Friday morning, have a tough-guy reputation, pumped up in recent years by a popular TV skit show. Twitter feeds in the hours following landfall kept up the image, but admitted some weaknesses too.
"Everybody cleared out from our office except one dude. Asked why, he said, I need me some coffee first," Twitter user @ma1ice_ma1ice wrote an hour after the celestial body streaked the sky over the region's eponymous capital, Chelyabinsk, a city of 1.1 million in the southern Ural Mountains.
Such stories jostled for online space with messages full of words like "fear," "panic" and "scared sh*tless," as well as numerous other expletives, which also abounded in most eyewitness videos posted on YouTube.
"Blinding flash of light, then a blast like we're being bombed. Lord, surviving this is unreal. I thought a war'd begun," wrote user @DANISHPRINCIPLE.
No deaths were reported as a consequence of the meteorite, but police said by early evening that nearly 1,000 people had been hurt, the majority of them injured by glass shattered by the shock wave.