* Astronomy

Multimillion-dollar meteorite heads for Portland State
An Argentine engineer in Buenos Aires picks through a pile of rocks and artefacts dug up over the years on his family farm. He settles on one peculiar object. It's unlike the other things tossed on the porch -- pestles and bowl-shaped mortars used for centuries by native people to grind grain. It's too big. Not the right shape, dark grey and pocked. It's 1997. A scientist in Austria finally solves the mystery: What we have here is an angrite, a rare meteorite. Museum after world-renowned museum had told the engineer from Argentina that it was nothing more than volcanic basalt as they poked and prodded small chips of the original 36-pound meteorite.

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