June 2018

Chris Wanstrath in 2010

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The announcement arrived of the agreement that sees Microsoft buy the hosting service for software projects GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. The rumors of the deal begun last week but two years ago Microsoft had already attempted the acquisition.

GitHub is a hosting service for software projects that use the Git distributed version control software, one of the inventions of Linus Torvalds, famous above all for being the father of the Linux operating system. The company behind the service was founded in 2008 with its office in San Francisco, initially as Logical Awesome and since 2010 as GitHub, Inc. rapidly achieving great success.

Be My Enemy by Ian McDonald

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The novel “Be My Enemy” by Ian McDonald was published for the first time in 2012. It’s the second book in the Everness series and follows “Planesrunner”.

Everett Singh is on the run on the airship Everness, of which he became a crew member. He hasn’t given up on finding his father, but it’s an almost impossible deed considering the amount of existing parallel universes. The next step requires a journey that could be very dangerous on a world that for some reason is quarantined.

Everett M Singh lost his father and he almost died too. Saved thanks to the use of alien technology, his body has been greatly modified giving him superhuman abilities. This has a price and Charlotte Villers sends him to hunt for his alter-ego, for whom he sets a trap.

Megachirella Wachtleri (Photo courtesy MUSE - Science Museum, Trento, Italy)

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research on Megachirella wachtleri, a reptile that lived about 240 million years ago of which a fossil skeleton was discovered in the Dolomites Mountains of Northern Italy. A team of researchers examined the remains of this animal concluding that it’s the oldest known ancestor of modern squamates, the taxonomic order that includes lizards, snakes and amphisbaenians.