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Meteorite That Hit Home Is Older Than Earth, Scientists Say

2 weeks 4 days ago
The BBC reports: A meteorite that crashed into a home in the U.S. is older than planet Earth, scientists have said... Researchers at the University of Georgia examined a fragment of the rock that pierced the roof of a home in the city of McDonough [30 miles south of Georgia, on June 26]. They found that, based on the type of meteorite, it is expected to have formed 4.56 billion years ago, making it roughly 20 million years older than Earth... The rock quickly diminished in size and speed, but still travelled at least 1 km per second, going through a man's roof in Henry County... Using optical and electron microscopy, Scott Harris [a Univeristy of Georgia geologist] and his team determined the rock was a chondrite — the most abundant type of stony meteorite, according to NASA — which meant that it was approximately 4.56 billion years old. "The home's resident said he is still finding pieces of space dust around his home from the hit."

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EditorDavid

KDE Calls Microsoft's Copilot Key 'Dumb', Will Let You Remap It Soon

2 weeks 4 days ago
Plasma 6.4.5 is coming September 9th, reports Neowin. But they also report that the KDE team is already focusing on other upcoming release: Starting with KDE Frameworks, KDE's collection of foundational libraries, version 6.18 promises to let you do something with that "dumb" Microsoft Copilot key found on many new laptops. The developers will soon allow you to set up keyboard shortcuts using this new key, and the team plans to let you remap it to another key in the future. If you're curious, one user on KDE's bug tracker noted that on GNOME, the key combination shows up as "Meta+Shift+Touchpad Disable" and is fully remappable... When you try to install a Flatpak from a website like Flathub in Plasma 6.5 [coming in October], Discover now has proper support for flatpak+https:// URLs, so it opens automatically. 6.5 is also bringing a much stricter window activation policy on Wayland to stop applications from rudely stealing your focus. And now, when you mute your microphone with a shortcut, the "Mute Microphone" button will mute all input sources, not just the active one. Since Firefox does not block the system from sleeping during a download, the Plasma Browser Integration extension for Firefox has gotten an update to handle that job itself.

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EditorDavid