December 2014

The Milky Way's magnetic field along the Galactic plane (ESA/Planck Collaboration. Acknowledgment: M.-A. Miville-Deschênes, CNRS – Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, Université Paris-XI, Orsay, France)

3

At first glance it might seem like a Vincent Van Gogh painting, actually, it’s the visualization of data collected by the Planck Surveyor satellite during its mission, which ended just over a year ago. In the course of about four and a half years, Planck observed the oldest light in the history of the universe but also a nearer light emitted by dust and gas in the Milky Way. The interaction between the interstellar dust in our galaxy and the structure of the galactic magnetic field is portrayed in this amazing image.

Shikasta by Doris Lessing

1

The novel “Re: colonized Planet 5, Shikasta”, also known simply as “Shikasta”, by Doris Lessing was published for the first time in 1979. It is the first novel of the Canopus in Argos series.

The planet Rohanda was among the most promising when its colonization was started by the interstellar empire of Canopus. However, the development of the humanoids on the planet became problematic due to outside interference. Between Canopus and the empire of Sirius there’s some collaboration but the planet Shammat of the Empire of Puttiora is an opponent with its own agenda.

Millennia later the planet Rohanda is known as Shikasta and Canopus agents can’t avoid the chaos that leads to constant wars between the native humanoids anymore. Some of them get corrupted worsening the situation. Johor, one of the agents of Canopus, does his best but his task seems impossible.

Fossil of Archaeopteryx lithographica at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris

0

The biggest project of genetic study of birds, called Avian Phylogenomics Consortium, has started giving results. 29 articles have been published of which 8 on a special issue of the journal “Science” and the other 21 in “Genome Biology”, “GigaScience” and other magazines. This project engaged for four years over two hundred scientists in many institutes of twenty nations that digged deep as never before with the study of the evolution of birds showing how there was a sort of Big Bang after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The Digital Einstein Papers home page

0

A collaboration between the American University of Princeton and the Israeli Hebrew University of Jerusalem allowed to put on line over 80,000 pages of documents written by Albert Einstein in the Digital Einstein project. The documents correspond to a set of paper books published in recent years by the Princeton University Press.

That’s not the only project that aims to make all the writings of the great scientist available. In recent years the University of Jerusalem created the “Einstein Archives Online”. Both projects are carried out with the collaboration of CalTech and include not only scientific papers but also letters and other personal writings.

2

On October 28, 2014 an engine failure caused the destruction of an Antares rocket shortly after the launch of the Cygnus spacecraft which was supposed to bring various supplies to the International Space Station. This reinforced the doubts about those Soviet-made engines forcing Orbital Sciences, the rocket’s owner, to look for alternatives. A few days ago, the company announced plans for the upcoming launches, starting with a contract for at least one launch of an Atlas V rocket.