July 2012

Doctor Who - Planet of Evil

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“Planet of Evil” is an adventure of the thirteenth season of “Doctor Who” classic series which aired in 1975. It follows “Terror of the Zygons” and it’s a four parts adventure written by Louis Marks and directed by Rodney Bennett.

The Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) responds to a distress call and takes the Tardis to the planet Zeta Minor. There, he and Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) find that the members of a Morestran scientific expedition were almost all killed. Only the expedition’s leader, Professor Sorenson, is still alive and thinks he’s on the verge of crowning many years of research on a new energy source.

A Morestran military starship arrives on the planet Zeta Minor shortly after the Tardis and the commander thinks that the Doctor and Sarah Jane have killed the members of the scientific expedition. The story gets even more complicated because the planet is on the edge of the known universe and beyond that there’s a big danger.

Sally Ride in the Space Shuttle Challenger on June 24 1983 (Photo NASA)

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Yesterday Sally Ride, the first American woman to have gone into space, passed away. She was the first American woman to travel in space being in two Space Shuttle missions. She helped change a rather sexist perceptions in the world of science and astronautics.

Ground Zero Man by Bob Shaw (Italian edition)

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The novel “Ground Zero Man” by Bob Shaw was published for the first time in 1971. In 1985 it was republished in a new revised version under the title “The Peace Machine”. Lucas Hutchman is a mathematician who works for a British missile project and one day discovers a way to detonate all the nuclear warheads in the world. When a nuclear bomb explodes in Damascus, he decides to build the machine that triggers the detonation but he must do it in secret not only from government agents but also from his wife even if his strange behavior stimulates her strong jealousy more than ever.

Doctor Who - Genesis of the Daleks

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“Genesis of the Daleks” is an adventure of the twelfth season of “Doctor Who” classic series which aired in 1975. It follows “The Sontaran Experiment” and it’s a six parts adventure written by Robert Holmes and directed by Rodney Bennett.

Artistic concept of the neutron star Swift J1822.3-1606 with its magnetic field (Image ESA–C. Carreau)

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Swift J1822.3-1606 is a peculiar neutron star because it features the typical X-ray emission of a magnetar but its magnetic field appears to be that of a pulsar. In recent months it’s been studied with space telescopes NASA’s RXTE (Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer) and Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA’s XMM-Newton and Japanese Suzaku but also with ground-based telescopes Gran Canarias Telescope and Green Bank Telescope.