This police bodycam footage begins in mundane form, with a pulled-over motorist being issued a ticket for some traffic infraction or other. A loud crash is heard, and while we can't see it, we know it's trouble because the cop lets the motorist off and dashes back to his car. He races to the scene of the accident and we see the box truck wrecked in the highway, flames dancing around the windshield and tires. The officer and another rescuer haul the disoriented driver from the fire. Barely a second or two later, a roaring noise is recorded and we soon see that the entire cabin is engulfed.

The driver suffered minor injuries, according to New Jersey State Police, and they don't know what caused the crash. Read the rest

This unidentified fellow barely missed being crushed by bricks and rubble falling off a building on London's Stoke Newington High Street. According to the BBC, the collapse was likely caused by high winds in the region.

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It's not great footage, being video of a video monitor recorded with a potato, but it's a quality bridge collapse with no apparent fatalities and one of the most cinematic escapes reality might provide: keep your eye on the person waiting for the train in the bottom right of the shot, next to the pillar.

Machtrans of the Russian caption:

On 09.10.2018 in the morning, there was a collapse of a CAR BRIDGE THROUGH A TRANSIB. A few more cars were miraculously managed to drive. The Russian Railways employee was born in a shirt! I almost died under this bridge! Angel keeps it!

This nice little explainer covers the nebulous concept of luck in a fun way. It summarizes the work of Richard Wiseman, who researched self-identified lucky and unlucky people. He found four key distinctions. Read the rest

Rod. His name is actually Rod. Read the rest

I feel that the current trends in cereal box art--the wildly distorted faces and poses, the lurid digital-airbrush modeling--have surely reached some kind of maximum. Read the rest

A video recently posted on YouTube appears to show a falling meteoroid just missing a skydiver in Norway. Fast forward to 1:31 to see it streak past.

"If you work out the mathematics, the odds of a 1-kilogram- rock (2.2 lbs.) passing within some 30 feet (9.1 meters) of a person on Earth's surface within 10 minutes is about 1 in 500 billion," Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office told Space.com. "You have a 1,000 times greater chance of winning the Powerball lottery."

UPDATE: Over at Slate, Phil "Bad Astronmy" Plait wrote, "It is entirely possible that what the video shows is a smaller rock that fell out of the skydiver’s parachute." Read the rest