Speakeasy: Meteorite illness - In Peru

And in true horror film style, EdH,

by Dave Konkel [Moderator]  - 9/18/07 6:34 AM

apparently some of the first-wave investigators have been overcome themselves (it's in the story, which I'd also planned on posting, till I saw it here already)

-- Dave K, Speakeasy Moderator
click here to email semods4@yahoo.com

Easy shot: "File photo shows the

green streak of a meteor cutting across the sky. Villagers in..."
And I've heard the local strongman is suddenly weakened ...

Seriously, I think green = copper, and copper poisoning includes vomiting.

Or the explosion affected something already in the soil.

That explains what I saw on Telemundo news last night but didn't fully understand. The graphics didn't give me anything about meteors, but I gathered there are more than a few down with the illness.

Tellurium supposed to be worse than garlic, they say.

A chemistry prof once said he thought that tellurium researchers should be given medals; the stuff gets in their systems so that they have B.O. while they're on the research.
I mentioned copper because a medic once said that Cu poisoning causes projectile vomiting; don't know if the Pervians had that in particular.

URLs: On the page you want to link, find the address bar on your browser. A left-click on that bar should highlight the whole address. Use Ctrl-C to copy it (to your clipboard). Then go back to the SE post you're writing and Ctrl-V to paste. There's also a way to 'hide' the actual URL inside a description of the page, but I'm too lazy to learn how. That's called Tiny URL, and there's a post somewhere on SE that describes it.

Update, with photo.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/americas/7001897.stm

But some experts have questioned whether it was a meteorite or some other object that landed in Carancas.
"Increasingly we think that people witnessed a fireball, which are not uncommon, went off to investigate and found a lake of sedimentary deposit, which may be full of smelly, methane rich organic matter," said Dr Caroline Smith, a meteorite expert at the London-based Natural History Museum. "This has been mistaken for a crater."
A team of scientists is on its way to the site to collect samples and verify whether it was indeed a meteorite.

Widespread belief all over the world...

...that meteors presage evil times, particularly breakouts of sickness.

(NT) Eventually ;-)

by Diana  - 9/23/07 3:12 PM