2014

Wilson Tucker in 1988

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Arthur Wilson “Bob” Tucker was born on November 23, 1914 in Deer Creek, Illinois, USA. Generally he used the name Wilson Tucker for the novels and short fiction published in books and professional magazines but in fanzines he generally used the name Bob Tucker. Occasionally he used other pseudonyms. During his long career he wrote mostly science fiction but also detective, mystery and spy stories. He was also very active in science fiction fandom and conventions.

Geological map of the giant asteroid Vesta. Brown colors represent the oldest, most heavily cratered surface. Purple colors in the north and light blue represent terrains modified by the Veneneia and Rheasilvia impacts, respectively. Light purples and dark blue colors below the equator represent the interior of the Rheasilvia and Veneneia basins. Greens and yellows represent relatively young landslides or other downhill movement and crater impact materials, respectively (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)

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A little over a year ago, an atlas of the giant asteroid Vesta was presented but the analysis of the data collected by the Dawn space probe went even further. A special issue of the journal “Icarus” was all about Vesta presenting a series of geological maps that show details never seen before the characteristics of its surface.

David Williams of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University led a team of 14 researchers in a task that lasted about two and a half years. The team used the photographs taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft when it spent more than one year orbiting Vesta to create a geological map.

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.