January 2015

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Eric Frank Russell was born on January 6, 1905 near Sandhurst, Berkshire, England. He wasn’t a prolific writer but the success of his stories in the American magazines helped the growth of British science fiction. His most famous novels are “Sinister Barrier” and “The Great Explosion”.

A "white screen of death" turns your blog pages to white. The image doesn't show the problem in a literal way.

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A few days ago I updated a plugin I use for my WordPress blog but the operation had an unwelcome consequence: a totally white screen. The refresh didn’t change the result and after a few tries I saw that all the pages gave that result, both in the control panel and in the blog. After a moment of panic I did a Google search because I didn’t know the problem and I solved it in a few minutes thanks to the solution found on an official WordPress support page. However, after thinking about the problem, I wondered how many bloggers would be able to solve it so quickly.

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In the summer 2014 the problems to the flash memory of the Mars Rover Opportunity’s computer became serious, convincing NASA mission manager to format it to try to solve them. Unfortunately, that operation was insufficient despite being carried out again in early December 2014. For this reason, Opportunity is temporarily working in a limited way without using the flash memory and at NASA they’re preparing a more sophisticated solution.

EAGLE image of the simulation of the history of a galaxy with some zooming (Image courtesy EAGLE project. All rights reserved)

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A team of astronomers from the Dutch University of Leiden and the British one of Durham created a simulation of the universe called EAGLE (Evolution and Assembly of Galaxies and their Environments). This project is run by the Virgo Consortium which has exactly the aim to produce cosmological simulations using supercomputers. The result, published in the January 2015 edition of the journal “Monthly Notices from the Royal Astronomical Society”, reproduces faithfully the evolution of the galaxies from a very uniform starting point.

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is one of the people who seek new year’s resolutions. He’s not an ordinary person and his focus is always on the Internet so it was almost inevitable that sooner or later he’d crowdsourcing to find some new ideas for his personal challenge. That’s what he did at the end of 2014 to find a new year’s resolution for 2015.