Earth is bombarded all the time by space rocks, but people rarely notice them--only 1,042 have ever been seen falling. People didn’t start recording these impacts until a couple hundred years ago, and then suddenly, they noticed all the time.Data designer Carlo Zapponi has a lovely new animation, Bolides, showing all these recorded impacts, along with every known meteorite fall--most of which weren’t seen when they happened. The information comes from The Meteorite Bulletin, which is maintained by the Nomenclature Committee of the Meteoritical Society. The word bolide comes from the Greek word for missile, and is used to describe bright fireballs.

As the saying goes: Where there's smoke, there's fire. That's certainly the case for Indonesia's Paluweh volcano. When the Landsat Data Continuity Mission satellite flew over Paluweh on April 29, it captured images of the smoke from the eruption and an infrared picture of fiery, molten lava at the apex of the volcano. Lava has been spewing from the island in recent months, according to NASA. The image shows off the satellite's ability to distinguish the contrast between hot and cold, capturing the boundaries between the hot volcanic activity and the cooler volcanic ash without the signal from the hot spot bleeding over into pixels [showing] the cooler surrounding areas, NASA reported. Older instruments couldn't do this as well — just as the sight of a flashlight distorts the eyes' ability to see darkness, hot objects can distort instruments' ability to see cooler ones nearby. But that's not the case with this new instrument, which was designed to get past previous limitations.

Californians are preparing for a prolonged season of wildfires after an unusually dry winter that left millions of acres of scrub brush in the most populous U.S. state primed to burn. The tinder-box conditions have sparked more than 840 wildfires since January, about 320 more than the five-year average, according to the state Forestry and Fire Protection Department, known as Cal Fire. A fast-moving fire in Ventura County over the weekend charred an area the size of San Francisco, forced the evacuation of a college with 4,900 students and threatened 4,000 homes northwest of Los Angeles. Wind-swept fires across the state following similarly dry winter months in 2008 burned more than 1.2 million acres and killed 13 firefighters, according to Cal Fire. In 2007, firestorms swept through Southern California, destroying 1,500 homes, displacing almost a million residents and killing 17.

Any day now, billions of cicadas with bulging red eyes will crawl out of the earth after 17 years underground and overrun the East Coast. The insects will arrive in such numbers that people from North Carolina to Connecticut will be outnumbered roughly 600-to-1. Maybe more.Scientists even have a horror-movie name for the infestation: Brood II. But as ominous as that sounds, the insects are harmless. They won't hurt you or other animals. At worst, they might damage a few saplings or young shrubs. Mostly they will blanket certain pockets of the region, though lots of people won't ever see them.

Many people think that all Preppers do what they do because they think that the end of the world is coming. While this may be true for some, many preppers also prepare for everyday events and disasters.As I sit watching the news over the last few days, I see people who were killed and injured in a bombing in Boston. Then yesterday another explosion close to where I live in Texas levels almost an entire town, killing at least 5 and as many as 15, injuring hundreds and leaving thousands without a place to live. There were thousands that were told to evacuate in a matter of minutes. One lady didn’t even have on any shoes and was loaned a pair. [APN]