2013

Doctor Who - Dragonfire

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“Dragonfire” is the last adventure of the twentyfourth season of “Doctor Who” classic series which aired in 1987 featuring the Seventh Doctor, Mel and Ace. It follows “Delta and the Bannermen” and it’s a three parts adventure written by Ian Briggs and directed by Chris Clough.

Image combining Hubble observations of M 106 with additional information captured by amateur astronomers Robert Gendler and Jay GaBany (Image NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), and R. Gendler (for the Hubble Heritage Team). Acknowledgment: J. GaBany)

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Astro-photographer Robert Gendler put together several photographs of the spiral galaxy M106 (Messier 106, also known as NGC 4258) taken over the years by the Hubble Space Telescope along with those made by him and another astro-photographer, Jay GaBany, to create one of the most remarkable astronomical images ever produced.

Ring of powdered rock produced by the Mars Rover Curiosity in its drill test (Photo ASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

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The Mars Rover Curiosity has been on Mars for several months but only now it made its first drilling test. For this test it used the drill mounted on its robotic arm to dig a hole in a rock named John Klein after an engineer of the project Curiosity who passed away in 2011.

The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

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The novel “The Algebraist” by Iain M. Banks was published for the first time in 2004.

Fassin Taak is a Slow Seer, a scholar who works in the Ulubis star system, which was cut off from the rest of the Mercatoria, a meta-civilization widespread in the Milky Way, after the wormhole connecting the Ulubis system to other stars was destroyed.

Fassin Taak’s task is to study the culture of the Dwellers, the inhabitants of Nasqueron, a gas giant planet in the Ulubis system. These beings are part of an ancient civilization that inhabits gas giant planets and is said to hide many secrets. Taak is enlisted into an organization that’s partly a military intelligence service and partly a religious order to discover one of those secrets, perhaps the only hope to save the inhabitants of the Ulubis system from the invasion of an interstellar fleet.

Michael Dell in 2010

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There had been already rumors for several weeks and yesterday the news became official: Michael Dell (photo ©mikeandryan), founder and CEO of Dell Inc., buys his company back along with equity firm Silver Lake and the participation of Microsoft with $2 billion. The acquisition amounts to a total of $24.4 billions.