January 2012

Doctor Who - Underworld

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“Underworld” is an adventure of the fifteenth season of “Doctor Who” classic series which aired in 1978 featuring the Fourth Doctor and Leela. It follows “The Sun Makers” and it’s a four parts adventure written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin and directed by Norman Stewart.

The Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) brings Leela (Louise Jameson) to the edge of the universe, where they encounter a Minyan starship, whose crew has been looking for the other survivors of their planet for a hundred thousand years, especially for the genetic bank of their species they could use to give their civilization a new beginning.

The Minyan starship enters a nebula in which the crew localized the signal from the other survivors but the material that compose it is attracted to the ship forming a planetoid around it. At the center of the planetoid they find the other Minyan spaceship and discover that they use the rocks to create fuel and food but most of the population are slaves.

Stephen Hawking and his daughter Lucy in 2008 at NASA's 50th anniversary (Image NASA/Paul Alers)

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Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford, England. He’s been working in physics and astrophysics research. He wrote scientific essays knows even outside science field such as “A Brief History of Time” and has been the protagonist of several documentaries.

Scott Thompson

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Four months after firing Carol Bartz, Yahoo! Inc. has chosen Scott Thompson as its new CEO. Thompson, who will officially take office on January 9, was born in 1958 and has a technical background because he was president of PayPal but previously held roles connected to technological innovation in that company as well as in others such as Inovant, a Visa subsidiary.

Hegira by Greg Bear (Italian edition)

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The novel “Hegira” by Greg Bear was published for the first time in 1979 and revised for a new edition in 1987. Hegira is a planet with a diameter six times the Earth. Its inhabitants can read the history and culture of the Firstborn on one thousand kilometers tall obelisks but chronologically theose information go from the bottom up so people can reach only the oldest part of the Earth’s history on the first few miles.