October 2015

Wetware by Rudy Rucker (Italian edition)

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The novel “Wetware” by Rudy Rucker was published for the first time in 1984. It won the Philip K. Dick Award. It’s the second book in the ware quadrilogy and is the sequel to “Software”.

In 2030 boppers have further evolved but are confined in their area after the end of the civil war. The Moon is now inhabited mainly by humans but a new drug could change things and allow a new generation of boppers to live on Earth.

The drug called merge allows to create a human-bopper hybrid using a woman as an incubator. It’s Della Taze, niece of Cobb Anderson, the boppers’ creator. The birth of her son Manchile can upset the new balance between humans and boppers with the creation of a generation of what are called meatbops.

Carbon nanotube circuits. In yellow the contacts, in white barely visible the nanotube (Image courtesy IBM Research)

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IBM announced a leap forward in the realization of carbon nanotubes circuits. It’s one of the most promising technologies in electronics but so far many problems in its practical application prevented its practical use. IBM now claims to have discovered a way to use it to create transistors to replace the current silicon-based ones.

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An article recently published in the journal “Nature” describes the study of the DNA of hominids found in a place in northern Spain called Sima de los Huesos, which means pit of bones. The DNA analysis of these fossils of hominids who lived between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago established that they are an early form of Neanderthals. According to paleogeneticist Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, the results suggest that the ancestors of homo sapiens separated from those of the Neanderthals and another species called Denisovans between 550,000 and 765,000 years ago.