June 2014

Artistic concept of Metaspriggina swimming near colonies of the cyanobacterium Marpolia

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The discovery of new fossils of Metaspriggina walcotti allowed to shed light on the origin of some of the characteristics of the chordates, animals with a backbone structure which in vertebrates has become the spine. It’s an animal lived about 500 million years ago, during the Middle Cambrian period. Due to their worm-like appearance and a length that could reach 10 centimeters (almost 4 inches), they don’t seem like much but they could be the ancestors of all vertebrates living today.

ASKAP image with the beams used to create it and the Moon for comparison (Image courtesy Ian Heywood and the ACES team/CSIRO. All rights reserved)

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The “Advancing Astrophysics with the Square Kilometre Array” meeting was held this week in the Giardini Naxos, Messina, Italy to talk about the latest updates of the SKA (Square Kilometer Array) project, the next-generation radio telescope that is expected to come into operation in 2020. The participants discussed the latest developments in the field of astrophysics and of course the research needed to complete the SKA project. The first picture taken by ASKAP (Australian SKA Pathfinder) was also showed as it’s one of the radio telescopes already under construction that will be integrated into the SKA.

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In Las Vegas, Hewlett-Packard’s CEO Meg Whitman, together with the company’s CTO Martin Fink, unveiled a new computer architecture that aims to revolutionize the sector. The Machine, as at the moment is called the new HP computer, uses hardware of type very different from the current such as photonics instead of copper and memristors instead of the current RAM and storage memories.

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Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, has never hidden his ambition to bring his spacecraft to Mars. Recently, in particular the unveiling of the Dragon V2 spacecraft, brought him back to the spotlight with new statements and interviews in which he talks a bit about his plans.

In the past, Elon Musk stated that he opened SpaceX with the ultimate goal of developing the technologies needed to bring people to Mars. For him it’s not just a scientific mission aiming to carry astronauts to the red planet to study it in person but to found a colony.

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Last Monday, Boeing held a press conference to show a mock-up of its CST-100 spacecraft. The company did it in Cape Canaveral, in an area of the Kennedy Space Center that was once used in the Space Shuttle program and in recent years was abandoned. In the last months, Boeing refurbished the area with the idea of ​​using it for the management of the CST-100 spacecraft space missions to conduct together with NASA.