Magnets wipe memories from meteorites, erasing billion-year-old data.

The "quick-and-dirty" method of meteorite identification persists because "not everybody cares about magnetic fields like Ben Weiss does", says Carl Agee, the meteoriticist at the University of New Mexico who first determined Black Beauty hailed from Mars. In 2011, nomads roaming the western Sahara encountered precious time capsules from Mars: coal-black chunks of a meteorite, strewn across the dunes. [Extracted from the article]

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