January 2014

Map of the climate on the brown dwarf Luhman 16B (Image ESO/I. Crossfield)

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ESO’s VLT (Very Large Telescope) allowed to create for the first time a map of the climate on the surface of a brown dwarf called Luhman 16B, formally known as WISE J104915.57-531906.1B. It’s part of a binary system together with another brown dwarf at a distance of about 6.5 light years from the Earth. That makes them the third closest star system to Earth after that of Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star. Despite their relative closeness, these brown dwarfs have been discovered only in early 2013 by astronomer Kevin Luhman, hence their informal name, because of their very faint light.

The Silurian Gift by Mike Tucker

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The novella “The Silurian Gift” by Mike Tucker was published for the first time in 2013.

The energy crisis has become very serious and the global consequences get worse and worse. The proposal of a new energy source highly innovative and environmentally friendly could change everything. The Eleventh Doctor wants to check the origins of the new energy source and to do so he must go to an old refinery near the South Pole.

Strange things happen at the refinery and the Doctor realizes that there’s an external factor at work. The director of the refinery is in contact with a group of Silurian scientists of a colony buried in the area. The matter becomes even more complicated because he’s accompanied by Lizzie Davies, who has her own agenda.

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Google has announced the sale of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for a total of $2.9 billion. $1.41 billion will be paid at the end of the agreement, $660 million in cash and $750 million in Lenovo shares. The remaining $1.5 billion will be paid over the next three years. Google bought Motorola Mobility in August 2011 for $12.5 billion.

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A multi-disciplinary team of scientists and engineers from the MITRE Corporation and Harvard University has taken a step forward that may be the key to the creation of nanomachines. In an article published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”, the team led by Charles Lieber, a nanotechnology expert at Harvard University, explains the method of creation of a microscopic processor consisting of hundreds nanotransistors.

Cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy during their spacewalk (Image NASA TV)

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Yesterday, Commander Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy, two Russian cosmonauts who are part of Expedition 38 on the International Space Station, performed a spacewalk to install a high-resolution video camera and a medium-resolution still camera on the Zvezda module of the Station but they had some problems. Specifically, the still camera didn’t send the expected telemetry signals.