2013

A picture of the Cepheid variable star RS Puppis taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (Image NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-Hubble/Europe Collaboration Acknowledgment: H. Bond (STScI and Penn State University))

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The star RS Puppis was observed during a period of five weeks by the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a Cepheid variable star about 6,500 light years from Earth. Because of its variability, its brightness continuously increases and decreases and these pulsations created a phenomenon known as light echo. In essence, the light emitted by the star seems to reverberate through the nebula that surrounds it, a phenomenon admired by astronomers thanks to Hubble.

The Dirk Gently Omnibus by Douglas Adams

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The novel “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” by Douglas Adams was published for the first time in 1987.

Richard MacDuff is a programmer who works at WayForward Technologies, which among others produces the software Anthem, which converts spreadsheets into music. One day he meets his old college tutor, Professor Chronotis, and sees him perform what seem magic tricks.

The Android logo (Image Google)

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Google has decided to open the counteroffensive against the Rockstar consortium, which in October 2013 sued Google and its partners Asus, HTC, Huawei, LG, Pantech, Samsung and ZTE for alleged violation by Android of some patents owned by the consortium. According to Google, Rockstar’s lawsuit has placed a cloud on Google’s Android platform; threatened Google’s business and relationships with its customers and partners, as well as its sales of Nexus-branded Android devices.

John von Neumann when he worked in Los Alamos

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Neumann János Lajos, this is his birth name, was born on December 28, 1903 in Budapest, in the then Austro-Hungarian Empire. John von Neumann developed mathematical applications in a variety of fields where there were many practical applications. His research concerned among other the Von Neumann-Bernays-Gödel (NBG) set theory, the ergodic theory, the von Neumann algebras and other fields which concerned sciences such as quantum mechanics. He’s also considered one of the fathers of computer science.

Flowers of Amborella trichopoda

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The sequencing of the genome of the amborella trichopoda (photo ©Scott Zona) helped solve the mystery of the appearance of flowering plants during the Cretaceous. Charles Darwin called it an abominable mystery due to the difficulty of understanding how plants evolved to result in the birth of the flowers. The Amborella Genome Project, which also published online the DNA sequences of this plant, has uncovered a horizontal gene transfer from other organisms.