Leigh Douglas Brackett was born on December 7, 1915, in Los Angeles, California. She was appreciated as a writer and a screenwriter for cinema and television. Her most famous literary works are the ones set on Mars and her Eric John Stark series. She wrote or co-wrote the scripts for movies such as “The Big Sleep”, “Rio Bravo”, “Hatari!”, “The Long Goodbye”, and “The Empire Strikes Back”. Leigh Brackett died of cancer on March 18, 1978.
An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” describes a research based on the sequencing of the DAN of tardigrades (Photo ©Bob Goldstein and Vicky Madden, UNC Chapel Hill). A team of researchers at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill announced that nearly 17.5% of tardigrades DNA is foreign, meaning that it comes from other organisms, mostly bacteria. However, a few days later another team from the University of Edinburgh announced that an independent sequencing gave very different results meaning that just a few foreign genes were found.
CryptoPeak Solutions, a virtually unheard Texas business, launched nearly 70 lawsuits against companies such as AT&T, Yahoo, Netflix, GoPro, Sony, Pinterest and Groupon claiming ownership of a patent on secure web connections, for instance the one that have a URL starting with https instead of http. This is the latest sensational case of a patent troll, meaning a company that exists for the sole purpose of obtaining money by using software patents.
An article published in the journal “Science Advances” describes a computer simulation carried out to better understand how to eat the Tribrachidium Heraldicum (photo ©Aleksey Nagovitsyn), a creature that lived about 555 million years ago. The results reveal that in such an ancient time there was already a complex ecosystem formed by the first complex organisms greater than previously thought.
The novel “Roma Eterna” by Robert Silverberg was published for the first time in 2003. It consists of 10 short stories previously published separately between 1989 and 2003.
In the year 1282 A.U.C. the Western Roman Empire is going through a period of crisis between external threats and tensions with the Eastern Empire. The Empire manages to survive offering Rome the hope of a new period of glory but also the problem of maintaining a sufficiently strong imperial power.
The Roman Empire faces a future of tensions between the sovereign of the West and the one of the East alternating periods of expansion to others of weaknesses. Among renaissances and decays, Rome keeps on maintaining its power becoming over the centuries a major world power.
