January 2013

Search the Sky by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth (Italian edition)

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The novel “Search the Sky” by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth was published for the first time in 1954. Frederik Pohl published a new revised version in 1985. Ross is a trader dissatisfied with his job and in general the society he lives in. His city is slowly depopulating but it seems that noone cares about it. When an interstellar starship arrives on his planet, he discovers that things are looking even worse in other star systems because other planets didn’t answer the radio signals sent when the starship passed close to them.

Mosaic of pictures taken by the Cassini space probe in the shadow of the planet Saturn (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

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The Cassini space probe has been orbiting Saturn for more than eight years and yet again in October 2012 it took a series of stunning images of this planet. Cassini was positioned in Saturn’s shadow and from that position it was able to take photographs of the dark side of the planet and its rings as previously happened only in 2006.

Dickinsonia costata, a typical fossil of the Ediacara biota

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An article published in the journal “Nature” in December is causing discussions among paleontologists. The reason is that according to Gregory Retallack, a geologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, life on land began 65 million years earlier than is generally estimated.