August 2013

Jerry Pournelle in 2005

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Jerry Eugene Pournelle was born on August 7, 1933 in Shreveport, Louisiana, USA. During his career, he’s written articles and essays on military strategy, science fiction stories on his own or with colleagues such as Larry Niven and computer science articles and textbooks.

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Exactly one year ago, one Earth year to be precise, the Mars Rover Curiosity landed on Mars. During what were called seven minutes of terror the complex landing system used for the first time brought the largest and most sophisticated robot sent so far on the red planet to its surface.

WWW: Wonder by Robert J. Sawyer

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The novel “WWW: Wonder” was published for the first time in 2011. It’s the third volume of the WWW trilogy and is the sequel to “WWW: Watch”.

Webmind survived the American attack but is still in danger. This intelligence emerged from the Internet infrastructure has decided to be friendly towards humans. With its processing capacity it analyzed a series of medical articles to put together the idea for a possible treatment of various forms of cancer it has made publicly available. This, however, isn’t enough to convince all of its good will.

Peter Capaldi in 2008

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In the special “Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor” it was officially announced that Peter Capaldi will be the Twelfth Doctor. The regeneration of the Eleventh Doctor is scheduled for the special episode of Christmas 2013. The actor has already participated in “Doctor Who”, playing Caecilius in the episode “The Fires of Pompeii”, the same that saw the Karen Gillan’s debut. Above all, he had an important role in “Torchwood: Children of Earth” playing John Frobisher.

A section of the Sun's atmosphere as seen by the SDO space probe on the left and by the IRIS space probe on the right (Image NASA/SDO/IRIS)

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On June 28 there was the launch of the IRIS (Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph) space probe, a part of the Small Explorer Program which aims to explore space with probes that have a contained cost. On July 17 the great day came when the IRIS probe started sending the mages captured by its telescope and the results show that it’s already keeping its promises providing researchers with details of the lower layer of the solar atmosphere never seen before.