August 2019

Cambroraster falcatus fossil (Image courtesy Jean-Bernard Caron© Royal Ontario Museum)

0

An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences” reports the discovery of a new species of marine predator that lived in the Cambrian period, just over 500 million years ago, discovered in the famous Burgess Shale. Joe Moysiuk, a graduate student at the University of Toronto, and his supervisor Jean-Bernard Caron named this animal Cambroraster falcatus believing that its carapace had a certain resemblance to the Millennium Falcon.

The Peripheral by William Gibson

0

The novel “The Peripheral” by William Gibson was published for the first time in 2014.

Life is hard for Flynne Fisher and her brother Burton in the rural town where they live, where many people make money by producing synthetic drugs. Burton suffered neurological damage while serving in the Marines and has some veteran benefits but can work for the producer of a virtual world that reproduces a futuristic London. When Flynne takes over for him, she realizes that in that virtual world there’s much more than she expected.

Wilf Netherton works with celebrities in post-apocalyptic London at the end of the 21st century, where the not rich have little chance of surviving. Among the services he offers, the trendiest is a connection with the past but when something happens to a client, things become very complicated since the only person who has an idea of ​​what happened is in the past.

Komodo dragon (Photo Midori)

0

An article published in the journal “Nature Ecology & Evolution” reports a complete genome sequencing of the Komodo dragon, the largest lizard existing today. A collaboration between the Gladstone Institutes, the University of California, San Francisco and the Atlanta Zoo that includes researchers from the Universities of Florence and Padua, Italy, led to the sequencing of the DNA of the species classified as Varanus komodoensis using various technologies to obtain a high quality result. This made it possible to compare that genome with that of other reptiles to understand how it has become a lethal predator with unique physiological and metabolic characteristics among reptiles.

The study of bacteria offers new clues to the evolution of photosynthesis

0

An article published in the journal “Trends in Plant Science” reports a deveolpment of a theory on the evolution of photosynthesis. Tanai Cardona and A. William Rutherford of Imperial College London studied various bacteria belonging to species capable of photosynthesis. Their conclusion is that the photosynthesis we know today thanks to plants was possible much earlier than previously thought and wasn’t an evolution of another form that is generally considered more primitive and doesn’t lead to the release of oxygen.