October 2014

Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan (Italian edition)

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The novel “Schild’s Ladder” by Greg Egan was published for the first time in 2002.

Cass made a long journey to the Mimosa star system, where there’s a station where she can verify the accuracy of the Quantum Graph Theory millennia after Sarumpaet developed it. However, when the experiments lead to the creation of the novo-vacuum, a bubble outside the universe that’s not the ordinary ordinary vacuum, it turns out to be much more stable than expected and starts expanding.

Six hundred years after Cass’s experiments, humanity is fleeing the expansion of the novo-vacuum, that is swallowing planet after planet. At the same time, many scientists are trying to understand the causes of this phenomenon but over time among humans have created two factions: the Preservationists who want to eliminate the novo-vacuum at all costs and the Yielders who want to find a way to interact with that separate reality.

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On October 15, 2014, the Euroleague 2014/2015 starts. Game 1 will start on Wednesday but in the following ones the games will be generally played on Thursday and Friday like in the last two seasons. For Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv defending the title surprisingly won last season seems impossible.

Image of the M82 galaxy with at its center, also magnified, the M82 X-2 pulsar (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/SAO/NOAO)

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NASA’s NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) Space Telescope allowed to discover a pulsar with a brightness never seen before. In an article published in the journal “Nature”, the international team led by Matteo Bachetti, who now works at INAF’s Astronomical Observatory of Cagliari and at the time at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie in Toulouse, France, illustrates the research that led to the discovery of this pulsar that emits energy ten million times that of the Sun.

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The independent inquiry board tasked with identifying the cause of the anomaly in the August 22, 2014 launch of the two satellites of the Galileo constellation announced its findings. The unofficial news that came at the end of September, which blamed a malfunction in the rocket’s Fregat upper stage. The freezing of the hydrazine used as a fuel resulted in the inability to insert the satellites in their correct orbit.

Artistic concept of the Orion spacecraft (Image NASA)

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NASA has invited people from all over the world to participate in an initiative to send your name to Mars. Simply register some personal data at the page prepared by the agency on its site to get a virtual boarding pass. All names will be recorded on a microchip that will be carried for a first trip in the flight test of the Orion spacecraft. It will then be transported in NASA missions to Mars as well.