March 2013

The Stars My Destination - also known as Tiger! Tiger! - by Alfred Bester (Italian edition)

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The novel “The Stars My Destination”, also known as “Tiger! Tiger!” by Alfred Bester was published for the first time in 1956, serialized in the magazine “Galaxy” and as a book.
Gulliver “Gully” Foyle is a mechanic with no ambitions who is the sole survivor of the crew of the spaceship Nomad after it was attacked and nearly destroyed. Remained adrift for months, he can barely survive when the starship Vorga passes in the area. Foyle signals his presence but is ignored and abandoned to his fate. The fury of that event turns an insignificant man in one possessed by the lust for vengeance and capable of any action to obtain it.

Alex Kingston in New York in 2011

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Alexandra Elizabeth “Alex” Kingston was born on March 11, 1963 in Epson, Surrey, England. Her mother is German so she speaks German. She’s famous especially for playing Dr. Elizabeth Corday in the TV show “ER” and River Song in the TV show “Doctor Who”.

Artist's cross-section of Lake Vostok, the largest known subglacial lake in Antarctica (Image Nicolle Rager-Fuller / US National Science Foundation)

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In recent days, the announcement arrived that a group of Russian researchers had discovered in Lake Vostok, Antarctica, bacteria of unknown type. Subsequently, however, the head of the genetics laboratory of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in St. Petersburg where the bacteria were analyzed stated that the samples had been contaminated during the research.

Artistic concept of a supermassive black hole (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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Two space telescopes, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuStar) and ESA’s XMM-Newton, were used together to measure for the first time the spin rate of a black hole. The object of the study is the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy NGC 1365, which according to findings spins at near the speed of light.

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On July 4, 2012 at CERN a press conference presented the preliminary results of two experiments, CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) and ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus), which confirmed the discovery of a boson that had the characteristics expected for the Higgs boson. Last wednesday, at the Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, additional data were presented obtained from those experiments that confirm that the particle discovered is really the Higgs boson.