March 2016

Giants' Star by James P. Hogan (Italian edition)

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The novel “Giants’ Star” by James P. Hogan was published for the first time in 1981. It’s the third book of the Giants series and follows “The Gentle Giants of Ganymede”.

After the departure of the starship Shapieron a series of signals is sent towards what has been called the Giants’ Star without many expectations. They just hope that the Ganymeans moved to that system and it will take many years before the electromagnetic signals will reach it.

Surprisingly, the answer comes just a few hours later and it seems to come from a Ganymean source. The Ganymean civilization has its center on a planet called Thurien but some surveillance system reamined in the solar system and intercepted signals that sere in an understandable code. The new contacts open the doors to new answers to the mysteries of human prehistory but some of them are more and more disturbing.

Ray Tomlinson in 2004

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Last Saturday the Internet pioneer Ray Tomlinson passed away, possibly due to a heart attack. He was best known for his inventions that created the modern e-mail system.

Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was born on April 23, 1941 in Amsterdam, New York, USA. He earned a Bachelor of Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and a master’s degree in electrical engineering at MIT in 1965. For his contributions to the development of the Internet, over the years, Ray Tomlinson received a number of honors such as the George R. Stibitz Computer Pioneer Award, the Webby Award, the IEEE Internet Award and the Prince of Asturias Award. When the Internet Hall of Fame was opened in 2012 he was one of the first that were inducted in it.

Filaments of Tortotubus protuberans (Image courtesy Martin R. Smith)

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An article published in the journal “Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society” describes a research on a fossil of Tortotubus protuberans, a kind of primordial fungus identified as the most ancient organisms that lived on the mainland so far discovered. The fossil dates back about 440 million years ago and it’s an organism that was crucial to pave the way for other life forms on the mainland.

The Gentle Giants of Ganymede by James P. Hogan

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The novel “The Gentle Giants of Ganymede” by James P. Hogan was published for the first time in 1978. It’s the second book of the Giants series following “Inherit the Stars”.

The spaceship Shapieron is on a mission in the Iscaris system when the star turns nova. The only choice is to leave as soon as possible but one of the on-board systems doesn’t work. The consequence is that once the interstellar propulsion is activated they’ll take a long time to slow down and in this case a long time means millions of years.

After the extraordinary discoveries obout the Lunarians and the subsequent ones on Ganymede that led to the theories about Minerva and the ancient civilizations who lived there, the research in the solar system continue. Things change radically when the presence of a spaceship that turns out to be Ganymean.

Fossil of Chengjiangocaris kunmingensis and the magnification of part of its nervous cord (Image courtesy Jie Yang (top), Yu Liu (bottom))

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An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” describes a research conducted on five fossils of Chengjiangocaris kunmingensis, a crustacean-like arthropod that lived about 520 million years ago in today’s China. They preserved beautifully, so much that their individual nerves are visible making them the oldest fossils to show such details.