January 2015

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Serena Williams has won the tennis Grand Slam tournament of the Australian Open 2014 defeating the Russian Maria Sharapova in the final 6-3 7-6 (5). For the American player it’s the 6th Australian Open title, her 19th Grand Slam title.

Autonomy by Daniel Blythe

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The novel “Autonomy” by Daniel Blythe was published for the first time in 2009.

Hyperville is a new complex devoted to 24/7 fun. You can go shopping but also visit the various sections devoted to entertainment. Hyperville uses the state of the art technology, maybe too much, and some suspect that behind it there’s something strange.

The Tenth Doctor appears in Hyperville to do his investigation and finds himself quickly in trouble because his use of the sonic screwdriver is detected immediately. Surveillance within the complex is very tight, officially for the sake of customers but is actually used to the Nestene Consciousness for its plans.

Tachyon Beam blog home page

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A blog is somehow alive and over time can change in many ways, even unexpected. That’s why, after more than four years of existence and almost 1,500 published articles, this blog is now facing a major change. Recently, articles about astronomy and space missions have increased so much that to convince me to open a second blog called Tachyon Beam hoping it will spread faster than light devoted exclusively to those themes.

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In recent years, there’s a lot of talking about the extraordinary properties of graphene for the next generation of electric circuits but also for other applications, for example as a substitute for plastics. One of the major obstacles to the adoption of graphene is its cost: a small piece of graphene can cost more than 1,000 Euros (more than 1,100 USD). Now Shou-En Zhu of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands showed a technique that could lower production costs a thousand times.

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The winners of the so-called Milestone Prizes have been announced. Those are the intermediate awards for a total of $6 million allocated during the Google Lunar XPRIZE. The ultimate goal is to bring a private automated spacecraft to the Moon and after its landing it must travel at least 500 meters on the surface and send images and data back to Earth. Five teams of participants showed their progress winning the Milestone Prizes while waiting to proceed with the attempts to actually send the spacecraft to the Moon.