News of the week selected by Impactscool – November 26th, 2018

Space X: in January the test launch of the capsule that will in the future bring passengers into orbit

January 7, 2019: if you are a space travel fan, mark this day in your calendar. Space X has announced that this will be the date of the long-awaited first flight of the Crew Dragon capsule, intended to bring men into orbit. The one in January, however, will only be a demonstration flight, carried out unmanned, and destined for the International Space Station. If no issues will occur during this test trip, the first men in orbit could arrive there with a new expedition next June; according to some sources, among the crew on that occasion there will be Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, two experienced astronauts, veterans of NASA. The demonstration flight of Crew Dragon has been called Demo-1 and will be launched with the Falcon 9 rocket, from Complex 39 of Kennedy Space Center, to Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Facebook will have to pay 100 million euros to the Italian tax authorities

An agreement has been reached between the Italian tax authorities and the company of Mark Zuckerberg, which definitively closes the dispute concerning tax investigations conducted by the fiscal police of the country and coordinated by the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office. Facebook, in fact, is accused of not having paid taxes due to the Italian tax authorities in the period between 2010 and 2016. The agreed amount, for a total of 100 million euros, corresponds to the total taxes that were not paid, with the addition of sanctions decided during the investigation. The Italian authorities, in recent years, carried out several similar initiatives to “flush out” any shortcomings in the payment of the necessary taxes in Italy by technological giants, such as Amazon and Google.

Here is the first total body scanner in the world

It’s called Explorer and is the first scanner capable of producing 3D images of the entire human body: it was presented Saturday, November 24^th in Chicago, during the annual conference of the Radiological Society of North America. Explorer was created by scientists Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi of the University of California at Davis. The scanner is able to recreate a diagnostic image of the entire human body in just 20 seconds; with this tool you can, for example, track drugs while they move within the body, quantitatively measure the flow of blood or the way the body absorbs glucose. Starting in June 2019, Explorer will be installed in the Imaging Center of the city of Sacramento, California, where it will be used in several research projects and studies on the human body.