Last Saturday the biochemist Christian de Duve died in his home in Nethen, Belgium. His health had deteriorated and a few weeks ago he decided to request euthanasia, which is legal in Belgium. In 1974, Christian de Duve received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine together with Albert Claude and George E. Palade for their discoveries concerning the structural and functional organization of the cell.
When it was night in French Guiana, from the Kourou base ESA’s Vega rocket was successfully launched in its VV02 mission. In the course of an operation that lasted almost exactly two hours, the satellites Proba-V, VNREDSat-1 and ESTCube-1 were put into two different orbits, demonstrating the great flexibility of the Vega launch system.
NASA has released a series of images taken by the Cassini spacecraft of the huge hurricane in progress at the north pole of the planet Saturn. The eye of this hurricane has a width of about 2,000 km (1,250 miles), about 20 times the average of the hurricanes on Earth, and the winds at its edges reach a speed of around 530 km/h (330 mph).
