January 2018

Official portrait of John Young (Photo NASA)

1

On January 5 the American astronaut John Young passed away after complications from pneumonia. John Watts Young was born on September 24, 1930 in San Francisco, California, USA. As a NASA astronaut, he took part to the Gemini 3, Gemini 10, Apollo 10, Apollo 16 (spending 3 days on the Moon), STS-1 (the first of the Space Shuttle program with the Columbia), and STS-9 missions.

During his life John Young received various awards and decorations from the Navy, NASA and the American Congress. They show in part his extraordinary contribution to decades of space missions. His passing means the loss of one of the men who have been on the Moon and in general of one of the great pioneers of space travel, a man who thought that the future of the human species was in space.

Brisbane City Flood 2013 (Photo ShepsSnaps)

0

An article published in the journal “Computers & Geosciences” describes a research into the possibilities of combining artificial intelligence, Twitter and what is called citizen science to create early warning systems for flood-prone communities. A team of researchers from the British University of Dundee led by Roger Wang worked to create solutions that can detect as quickly as possible the first signs of danger to activate countermeasures.

Halobacterium salinarum (Image courtesy of Alexandre Bison/Harvard University)

0

An article published in the journal “Nature Microbiology” describes a research on the mechanisms of cell size regulation in the three domains of life: archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes. In a previous research, a team led by Ariel Amir of Harvard University discovered that bacteria from the E. coli family and eukaryotes of the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae, commonly known as budding yeast, use the same cellular mechanisms to have uniform cell size in a population. Now, together with other collaborators, the team discovered that archaea use the same mechanisms as well.

Paradise by Mike Resnick

1

The novel “Paradise” by Mike Resnick was published for the first time in 1993. It’s the first book in the Galactic Comedy series.

Matthew Breen is a journalist who wants to write a book on the planet Peponi, a former human colony to which the Republic granted independence, leaving the government to the native sentient species. To do this, he interviews some people who lived on Peponi and then left it.

A few years later, Matthew Breen gets invited to Peponi by its president Buko Pepon, who asks him to write his biography. To do this, the journalist must not only interview him but also investigate the situation of the planet and the natives after independence, discovering a series of problems.