March 2015

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On March 29 the fifth season of the show “The Walking Dead” ended.

The fifth season was produced and broadcast with the format has become usual: 16 episodes of which 8 were broadcast in October / November 2014 and the other 8 in February / March 2015. The record audience no longer makes news and people are waiting for the spinoff, which according to the latest news will be titled “Fear the Walking Dead”.

The fourth season of “The Walking Dead” ended in Terminus, where Rick and some members of his group realized that the place was inhabited by cannibals, who captured them. The fifth season begins with the brutal struggle of those who don’t want to become cattle to the slaughter.

A 3D NAND Die with an M.2 SSD (Image courtesy Intel. All rights reserved)

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Intel and Micron have announced a new technology for the production of 3D NAND flash memory. With its 32 layers of flash cells, it will allow to get a storage capacity three times higher than competitor NAND technologies in a “die”, a block of semiconductor material on which electronic circuits were created, of standard size. The result are 256 GB dies in the MLC (Multi Level Cell) type and 384 GB in the (Triple Level Cell) type.

A graphene membrane, in red, with silicon atoms in yellow (Image courtesy Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US Dept. of Energy. All rights reserved)

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An article published a few days ago on the journal “Nature Nanotechnology” describes a research on a new technique for the desalination of seawater using a porous membrane made of graphene. This material is considered revolutionary in the field of electronics for its characteristics but research like this are showing that it can also be very useful in other fields. In the case of desalination, its use can make it much more efficient needing much less energy to get drinking water.

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Now it’s official: after many rumors came the confirmation that “The X-Files” will be back on TV with new episodes. After 13 years from the end of the show, 6 new episodes will be produced with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, who will reprise their roles as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Chris Carter, the show’s creator, will be again the executive producer. Filming will begin this summer and, although no information was provided on their broadcat date, it’s likely that it will happen in 2016.

The VALIS trilogy by Philip K. Dick containing VALIS, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (Italian edition)

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The novel “VALIS” by Philip K. Dick was published for the first time in 1981.

Horselover Fat had a very strange experience when he thinks a ray of pink light downloaded to his brain a huge amount of information he doesn’t know how to interpret. He askss for help to his friends Phil, Kevin and David but for him the situation is complicated after the suicide of his friend Gloria and because of his friend Sherri’s cancer.

For Horselover Fat, his experience is of the mystical / religious kind, a search for God. His reflections lead him to believe that reality isn’t what it seems and that the Roman Empire never ended. God’s nature seems to be more complex than he thought, connected to the VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) system.