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September 22, 2025—The sordid tale of a meteorite smuggled out of Somalia to China. Plus, landslides are increasing all over the world, and a weak link between acetaminophen and autism. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Kristoffer Tripplaar/Alamy Stock Photo | | The El Ali meteorite's original landing site in Somalia is a dry valley without much vegetation. From "El Ali Meteorite: From Whetstone to Fame and to the Tragedy of Local People's Heritage," by Ali H. Egeh, in Meteoritics and Planetary Science; June 12, 2025. | | Thousands of years ago, a meteorite weighing 13.6 metric tons landed outside the village El Ali in Somalia, in East Africa. Called Shiid-birood ("the iron rock"), the object became a landmark in the region for generations, even featured in folklore, lullabies and poems. Now the El Ali meteorite is gone. A shaky cell-phone video from May 2023 suggests the rock is being held in storage in Yiwu, a midsize city in the Chinese province of Zhejiang, and is being offered for sale in pieces at $200 a gram or at $3.2 million for the entire thing, according to one researcher Scientific American's Dan Vergano spoke to. Last month, a Somali cultural minister called for its return. What happened: Sometime in February 2020, the stone was removed from the village El Ali, with some accounts claiming it was forcibly taken amid gunfights and bloodshed. Local militia then reportedly sold it to the Kureym mining company for $264,000. Scientists first learned about Shiid-birood later in 2020 when the mining company reached out to experts to get the meteorite analyzed for publication in a scientific journal, a necessity to verify its provenance as a meteorite. Scientists have since asked for clarification of the origin of the object, but the mining company has cut off communication. Why this matters: The case of Shiid-birood demonstrates how commonly meteorites are looted from their original communities. Clear rules of meteorite ownership exist within the U.S. and tracking meteorites is done in many countries under a 1970 UNESCO agreement. However, Sharia law currently governs the area the object was taken from, and scholars aren't sure how the law treats meteorites. China has become a destination for smuggled meteorites in recent years. In 2019 customs authorities seized 857 kilograms of "dolomite" that turned out to be meteorites taken from Kenya. The Kamil impact crater in Egypt was reportedly "strip-mined" for iron meteorites sometime between 2020 and 2023. "There are museums full of stolen stuff," says A. J. Timothy Jull, an expert on dating meteorites at the University of Arizona. | | As the climate continues to warm, landslide risk is expected to increase across much of the world. Climate change is causing more frequent bursts of rain that fall over a short period in concentrated areas. Such intense rainfall events are known to be the biggest trigger of landslides. In 2024 the U.S. Landslide Susceptibility Index revealed that 44 percent of the land in the U.S. could potentially experience landslide activity. Why it matters: The U.S. states are unevenly conducting landslide risk surveys and incorporating them into guidelines. For example, the city of Juneau, Alaska, carried out a risk mapping project in 2024, highlighting areas of concern, but the community vehemently rejected it. In Vermont, as in many places, evidence of slope instability—or even past failures—hardly factors into development or the issuing of building permits. What the experts say: The year with the greatest number of landslides was 2024. "Last year was completely off the scale," says geologist David Petley, who has been maintaining a database of deadly landslides worldwide since 2004. "The most simple hypothesis is that it was the year with the highest-ever global temperature. Last year I saw an extraordinary frequency of big storms that were triggering hundreds of thousands of landslides," Petley says. They occurred at different locations all over the world.
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Welcome to a new week of scientific discovery! What does discovery actually mean? In 1934 legendary philosopher of science Karl Popper wrote: "We do not take even our own observations quite seriously, or accept them as scientific observations, until we have repeated and tested them." For Popper, it was perhaps more important to show that a finding was not true than to prove something correct. How else to filter out random, coincidental observations? "Discovery," then, cannot be proclaimed willy-nilly. It is the end result of many studies examining the same phenomenon. And more often than not, those studies take time. | | From one discovery lover to another, thank you for reading Today in Science. Send any feedback to: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow! —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor
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