September 2012

Doctor Who - Horror of Fang Rock

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“Horror of Fang Rock” is the first adventure of the fifteenth season of “Doctor Who” classic series which aired in 1977 featuring the Fourth Doctor and Leela. It’s a four parts adventure written by Terrance Dicks and directed by Paddy Russell.

Flowers in a blue vase by Vincent Van Gogh

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In 2009, it was found that a part of the “Flowers in a Blue Vase” by Vincent Van Gogh had formed an orange-gray crust on parts of the painting in which cadmium yellow was used. The Kröller-Müller Museum had two samples of the painting a fraction of a millimeter in size analyzed to understand what happened.

Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov (Italian edition)

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The novel “Pebble in the Sky” by Isaac Asimov was published for the first time in 1950. Joseph Scwharz is a retired tailor who becomes the victim of an accident that happened in a nuclear power plant that transports him to a distant future where the Earth is radioactive and only some areas are habitable. Confused by the fact that everything around him suddenly changed, Schwarz seeks help but the people he encounters don’t speak English. Committed to the care of a scientist as a guinea pig for an experiment of synaptic augmentation, his mind starts changing.

Map of the dry ice snowfalls on the South Pole of Mars (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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NASA’s space probe Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has provided evidence of snow made of dry ice, which is solid carbon dioxide, falls on Mars. It’s the only known example of this type of snowfall throughout the solar system.