July 2019

Maxillary bone from Scladina Cave (Image courtesy J. Eloy, AWEM, Archéologie andennaise. All rights reserved)

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An article published in the journal “Science Advances” reports a study carried out on the DNA of two Neanderthals who lived in today’s Germany and Belgium about 120,000 years ago. A team led by Dr. Stéphane Peyrégne of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, used genetic data obtained from bones still in good condition of the two individuals, concluding that they were members of a population from which all of the later identified Neanderthals descended except the ones who lived on the Altai Mountains in Siberia.

The Hercules Text by Jack McDevitt

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The novel “The Hercules Text” by Jack McDevitt was published for the first time in 1986.

Abnormal cosmic signals from a pulsar are detected by the Hercules project’s radio telescope, causing considerable excitement among NASA scientists. Harry Carmichael works at the agency’s administration and needs to get the details explained by the scientists, who tell him that the signals’ characteristics point to an artificial nature.

The signals cease for some time and then restart with the sending of a considerable amount of data. Their decipherment reveals a great variety of information with mathematical formulas and other scientific data but with the passage of time also what seem philosophical texts and poems arrive, whose translation turns out much more complex and ambiguous.