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Olympic athletes who win the gold at Sochi on February 15th are in for a special treat -- a medal containing meteorite pieces from the Chelyabinsk meteor, which streamed across the Russian sky on February 15, 2013. The meteor is believed to have been the largest natural object to enter the atmosphere and ultimately fragment and crash into the Earth as meteorites since the 1908 Tunguska event struck Siberia. Gold medal winners on February 15th will get the regular gold medals, plus the 10 athletes will be awarded special commemorative medals with a piece of meteorite embedded in their centers. The Chelyabinsk meteor produced chondrite meteorites that contain 10% iron. The medals holding the meteorite fragment have been crafted of gold and silver. Fifty of the medals have been made, with the other 40 going to private collections. According to Chelyabinsk Region Culture Minister Aleksey Betekhtin, " We will hand out our medals to all the athletes who will win gold on...

February 3 rd , 1966 was a day for two 'firsts' during the Space Race between the United States and Soviet Union. The United States launched the first meteorological satellite, the ESSA-1. ESSA-1 (Environmental Science Services Administration) would take photographs of cloud cover and transmit the data to the National Meteorological Center. It would be supplemented by 8 other ESSA satellites over the next three years and provided weather information to receiving stations in 45 different countries. The Soviet Union successfully landed a probe on the surface of the Moon for the first soft landing on another celestial body. The Luna 9 spacecraft touched down and began taking photographs of the area around the landing site. Luna 9 was the second spacecraft to reach the moon after the Luna 2 probe crashed into the surface in 1959.

Chemistry isn't just for the classroom. In everyday life, you encounter chemistry in cooking and cleaning... really, just about everywhere. Some hobbies use a lot of chemistry. For example, if you get into home brewing, you'll learn about how fermentation works, so you can control alcohol and sugar content of your beer. Is beer hard to make? Not at all. The trick is to make good beer.

Have you ever wondered what whales drink? You probably know all animals require water to live. Humans drink fresh water and get water from the foods we eat. If we eat foods that contain enough water, we could get the water we need without actually drinking it. If we drink seawater the salt overwhelms our kidneys, essentially making us thirstier. However, whales ingest some seawater with the foods they eat, yet are fine. Just like us, whales need fresh water in order to live. They get most of this water from the food they eat (krill, fish, or plankton). Whale kidneys are made to extract water from their food and possibly some seawater. This is similar to the way terrestrial desert animals get water from their food.