September 2017

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The news came that yesterday the writer Jerry Pournelle died in his sleep at his home in Studio City, California.

His military experience, both at the front and in weapon development projects, also accompanied Jerry Pournelle’s career as a writer. Today, military science fiction has become an acknowledged subgenre that has its importance and its fans but in the past it had little consideration and Jerry Pournelle’s works were crucial to its development.

Jerry Pournelle was a complex person with a life spent working in many different fields so it’s a case where every label would be trivial and would only describe a small part of him. It’s thanks to all the experiences he accumulated that in his stories he created complex situations in which the characters ended up finding solutions to problems that were far from politically correct.

The team of palaeontologists from Monash University and Museums Victoria (Photo courtesy Ben Healley, Museums Victoria)

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An article published in the journal “Biology Letters” describes a research on the evolution of whales’ feeding habits. A team of paleontologists at Monash University and Museums Victoria studied the teeth of ancient whales to try to reconstruct their changes and the results suggest that they were fierce predators.

Orbitsville Judgment by Bob Shaw (Italian edition)

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The novel “Orbitsville Judgement” by Bob Shaw was published for the first time in 1990. It’s the third novel of the Orbitsville series and is the sequel to “Orbitsville Departure”.

Orbitsville has been moved but it’s not clear where it ended and its human inhabitants don’t know who could have done it. For many of them, however, life continues because they always lived only within the immense sphere so for them being in a universe or another is the same.

Jim Nicklin lives a boring and mostly lonely life and his job is repairing home appliances and various machines. By chance he comes across a preacher who thinks that Orbitsville’s move is a sign of divine will. Jim isn’t interested in religion but when the passion for a woman in the congregation breaks out he decides to give up everything and join them.

Patricia Tallman in 2012

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Patricia J. Tallman was born on September 4, 1957 in Pontiac, Illinois, USA. She worked as an actress in a lot of theater, cinema and television productions but often worked as a stuntwoman.

Patricia Tallman’s most famous television role is as Lyta Alexander, played for the first time in “Babylon 5 – The Gathering” (1993), the TV movie that started the TV show “Babylon 5”. The actress resumed her role in some episodes of the show’s second and third seasons then was a regular in the fourth and fifth seasons and in the 1998 TV movie “Babylon 5 – Third Space”.

Images of galaxies taken using gravitational lenses (Image Yashar Hezaveh/Laurence Perreault Levasseur/Phil Marshall/Stanford/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; NASA/ESA)

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the application of neural networks to gravitational lensing. A team of researchers reduced from a few weeks to a few seconds the time needed to analyze complex space distortions in images captured thanks to gravitational lenses. This could greatly facilitate this type of task with great benefits for astronomical research.