March 2014

Carlo Rubbia in 2012

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Carlo Rubbia was born on March 31, 1934 in Gorizia, Italy. As a physicist, he carried out a lot of research at CERN, where he discovered the W and Z bosons, which earned him the Nobel Prize for physics. He’s still active with various projects that go from pure physics to alternative energy.

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Yesterday the British actress Kate O’Mara passed away after a short illness. She was in a nursing home in Sussex. In her career she was famous for her roles in various soap operas, especially “Dynasty”, and for playing the Rani in “Doctor Who”.

Fossil of Askeptosaurus italicus

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About 252 million years ago the largest extinction in history happened at the end of the Permian period. About 90% of marine life disappeared in a relatively short period and so far paleontologists believed that it took around 8-9 million years before, in the Triassic period, large predators reappeared. Now a study of a group of paleontologists led by Torsten Scheyer and Carlo Romano of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, claims that new predators quickly emerged at the beginning of the Triassic.

Chariklo is an asteroid with rings

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Seven astronomical observatories in South America, including the 1.54-meter Danish telescope and the TRAPPIST telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, allowed to discover that the asteroid 10199 Chariklo has two rings of dust and other particles. So far, rings were found only around the major planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Steve Swanson, Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev in front of their Soyuz TMA-12M spacecraft on March 21 (Photo NASA/Victor Zelentsov)

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A few hours ago the spacecraft Soyuz TMA- 12M, which lifted off a little over two days ago from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, has reached the International Space Station carrying three new crew members. The Soyuz was expected to use the fast trajectory regularly used but a sheduled thruster burn didn’t occur and that didn’t allow the spaceship to take the correct route. It was no longer possible to make a course correction so the Soyuz used the backup trajectory, normally used until a couple of years ago, which requires about two days of travel.