August 2013
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
The novel “The Windup Girl” by Paolo Bacigalupi was published for the first time in 2009. It won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, John W. Campbell Memorial and Compton Crook awards as the best science fiction novel of the year.
Anderson Lake is a representative of AgriGen, a mega-corporation in the field of biotechnology. He works in Thailand, in theory running a local factory but in fact his purpose is to find a seed bank created by the Thais to allow their nation to survive the various diseases generally artificially created that affect plants all over the world.
NASA wants to reactivate the WISE space telescope as an asteroid hunter
NASA has decided to reactivate the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) Space Telescope after about two and a half years of inactivity. Its mission will be to find the so-called near-Earth objects (NEOs), asteroids and comets whose orbits cross that of the Earth and are therefore potentially dangerous.
A newly born star observed by the ALMA telescope
The ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope has allowed to obtain extraordinary images of jets of material emitted by a newborn star. The object of this observation is called Herbig-Haro 46/47 and the analysis of the glow coming from its molecules of carbon monoxide has allowed to establish that the jets are even more energetic than expected.
Yahoo! has again more web traffic than Google in the USA
For the first time since May 2011, on July the Yahoo! portal was the most visited in the U.S.A. surpassing Google. This result was presented by ComScore, a company specialized in marketing research on the internet. The traffic measured doesn’t include visits to the pages of Tumblr, the service bought by Yahoo! a few months ago.
