November 2014

CERN Open Data Portal Home Page

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CERN has announced the opening of the Open Data Portal. It’s a new website that is part of the organization’s Internet infrastructure where the data produced by the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider will be made freely accessible to anyone. Many details of CERN’s ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments experiments will be made available and among them there are those that led to the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson.

All the lives he led by Frederik Pohl

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The novel “All the lives he led” by Frederik Pohl was published for the first time in 2011.

Brad Sheridan works in Pompeii among the staff of the Giubileo, the 2000th anniversary of the great Vesuvius eruption that buried the ancient city in ancient times. He does earn much but his job is simple because tourists are entertained mostly by virtual reality reproductions of the ancient Pompeii.

His pay isn’t much but for Brad the situation is better than in the USA, so much that he always sends money to his family back home. However, in Italy there are problems too with terrorism and a form of flu might make many victims among tourists. Brad tends to get into trouble and the situation with his girlfriend Gerda also becomes more and more complicated.

NASA astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore while installing the 3D printer on the Internationa Space Station (Image NASA TV)

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Last Monday on the International Space Station a 3D printer was installed, the first designed to work in space in microgravity. For the moment it’s an experiment to see if this type of instrument is working properly in that kind of conditions. Once the testing phase is completed, they can begin to produce objects of practical use on the Station.

Philae's trajectory on the surface of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (Image ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA)

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The news hasn’t been officially released by ESA and the details have yet to be assessed after the analysis of the data sent by the lander Philae before it went into hibernation. Unofficially, one of the Philae’s instruments detected organic molecules in the tenuous atmosphere of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko created by the ice sublimation. Meanwhile, ESA has released the images captured by the Rosetta space probe that show Philae’s trajectory after it touched down for the first time on the comet’s surface.

For Us, The Living by Robert A. Heinlein (Italian edition)

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The novel “For Us, The Living” by Robert A. Heinlein was published for the first time in 2003.

Perry Nelson is driving his car when he has a blowout and goes off the road falling over a cliff. When he wakes up is rescued by Diana begins but for him a lot of confusion starts because the girl tells him that it’s January 7, 2086 me he had the accident on July 12, 1939.

In a century and a half, the American society changed enormously and sometimes for Perry Nelson it’s really difficult to adapt to new customs. To him, to get used to the new situation will mean above all to question his old beliefs. Social changes will be the most difficult for him to understand and accept.