April 2013

Echo by Jack McDevitt (Italian edition)

0

The novel “Echo” (“Echo”) by Jack McDevitt was published for the first time in 2010. It’s part of the Alex Benedict series.

The antiquities dealer Alex Benedict finds a stone slab with an inscription in an unknown alphabet. The slab belonged to Somerset Tuttle, an eccentric archaeologist who spent his life looking for aliens, but without success. Benedict manages to buy the slab from the current owner but when he goes to pick it turns out that someone had preceded him.

Artist's concept illustrating how charged water particles flow into Saturn's atmosphere from the planet's rings (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/University of Leicester)

0

In an article published on “Nature”, a team of scientists led by James O’Donoghue, University of Leicester, England, explains how a rain of charged particles from Saturn’s rings falls on the planet in much greater quantities and on a much wider area than previously thought.

Kobe Bryant between Derek Fisher and President Barack Obama at White House in 2010

2

In the course of the match played yesterday between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Golden State Warriors, Kobe Bryant got injured seriously. The diagnosis is a torn Achilles tendon, an injury that requires from 8 to 12 months to come back. Today he should have an MRI to understand the severity of his injury.

1

Google, in collaboration with other companies such as BlackBerry, EarthLink and Red Hat, submitted to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) a series of comments. Their request is of a greater vigilance against the phenomenon of “patent trolling”, which is the use of patents for the sole purpose of restricting competition and to obtain money through lawsuits or through agreements following threats of such action.

0

Yesterday the British biologist Robert Edwards, a pioneer of artificial fertilization, died following a long illness. Born on September 27, 1925, Edwards received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of in vitro fertilization in 2010.