2014

Picture of the HL Tauri system with its forming planets taken by the ALMA telescope (Image ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO))

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In September 2014, ESO’s ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope began the long baseline campaign, the one with the antennas separated by the maximum length achieved so far, which is 15 km away (a little more than 9 miles). In this mode, more powerful than before, ALMA observed with great results HL Tauri, a young star about 450 light years from Earth. It’s surrounded by a disk of dust that is slowly coalescing in certain areas to form planets.

R.A. Lafferty in his home around 1985

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Raphael Aloysius Lafferty was born on November 7, 1914 in Neola, Iowa, USA. He started his career as a writer only at the end of the ’50s. Most of his works are considered science fiction, though he had a very personal style, but he wrote stories of various genres, including the historical one. R.A. Lafferty died on March 18, 2002 in a nursing home in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

Destination: Void by Frank Herbert

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The novel “Destination: Void” by Frank Herbert was published for the first time in 1965 in the magazine “Galaxy” with the title “Do I Wake or Dream?” and as a book in 1966. A revised edition was published in 1978.

An interstellar spaceship is traveling to the Tau Ceti system carrying a crew in hibernation. It’s led by an Organic Mental Core (WTO), a brain separated from his body. However, in a short time two WTOs have become catatonic and a third one has gone mad.

The few members of the emergency crew have very few choices to avoid the order to abort the mission and return back before leaving the solar system. One of the possibilities is to develop an artificial consciousness. However, it seems that the official information on the mission don’t always correspond to the truth.

Fabiola Giannotti at the ATLAS experiment (Photo courtesy Claudia Marcelloni/CERN. All rights reserved)

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CERN has announced the appointment of Italian scientist Fabiola Gianotti as new Director-General. The formalization will take place at the December meeting of the Council of Delegates that govern CERN. Dr. Gianotti’s mandate will start on January 1, 2016 and will run for five years. She’ll be the first woman to hold that office.

ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter with the Eye Tracking Device (Photo ESA/NASA)

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The use of lasers in eye surgery has become normal and now a space technology has become part of the surgical instruments. It’s an instrument that can follow the patient’s eye movements without interfering with the work of the surgeon and consequently direct with extreme precision the laser scalpel.