April 2013

The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke

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The novel “The Fountains of Paradise” by Arthur C. Clarke was published for the first time in 1979. It won the Hugo and Nebula awards for the best novel of the year.

Vannevar Morgan is an engineer who has designed extraordinary works and now his new dream is to direct the construction of a space elevator. It would be an incredibly complex work that would connect the surface of the Earth to a geostationary orbit about 36,000 km (about 22,300 miles) high. In a future in which part of the solar system has been colonized and many spaceships depart and arrive on Earth, a space elevator would greatly reduce the cost of transportation of people and cargo to orbit.

The Space Shuttle Challenger lifting off for its first space mission

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On April 4, 1983, the Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off on its first space mission, the second orbiter to be put into service after the Columbia. The Challenger completed nine space missions but on January 28, 1986 it was destroyed after its lift off for its tenth mission following a fault causing the death of its crew.

Some racks of the Roadrunner supercomputer (Photo LeRoy N. Sanchez, Records Management/Media Services and Operations)

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In the last weekend the Roadrunner supercomputer, which at the time of its activation in 2008 was the most powerful in the world, was officially decommissioned. It was the first PetaFLOPs computer, which means that it’s been the first to break the petaflop barrier in its computer power.

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“The Walking Dead” is a story set in a post-apocalyptic world where an infection turns corpses into zombies, causing the collapse of civilization. The only way to permanently kill a zombie is to hit its brain. This is my review of its third season.

Saturn's rings and its satellites Dione, Rhea and Enceladus photographed by the Cassini space probe (Photo NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

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A new analysis of the data received from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has led to compare Saturn’s rings and satellites to a kind of antique shop where you can find items […]