November 2016

Invertebrate schematic (Image courtesy University of Sydney)

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the discovery of 1,445 new RNA viruses, or retroviruses, including some previously unknown families. A team from the University of Sydney and the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing focused on invertebrates to discover the viruses that infect them. The use of new technologies allowed to extend the knowledge of virus families but also of for ways to determine what cause human diseases.

Only Human by Gareth Roberts

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The novel “Only Human” by Gareth Roberts was published for the first time in 2005.

The Ninth Doctor wants to bring Rose Tyler and Captain Jack Harkness to Kegron Pluva but the Tardis detects a time distortion caused by a “dirty” time machine. The planned trip has to wait and the Doctor reroutes the Tardis to the Earth at the beginning of the 21st century.

The travelers discover that there’s something strange when they learn that a man dressed like a caveman was involved in a brawl. When they go to the hospital where he was taken, where his presence is covered by a false Ebola alarm, the Doctor realizes that he’s a Neanderthal. Speaking with him, he understands the origin of the time distortion, which must be eliminated to avoid further problems.

Representation of translations made by the GNMT system (Image courtesy Google)

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A few weeks after announcing that the Google Translate service would be upgraded to use an machine learning system called Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT), the engineers who run it announced that the new system has made great progress. In particular, it showed that it can translate from one language to another without specific training through an interlingua created on its own.

Poul Anderson in 1985

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Poul William Anderson was born on November 25, 1926 in Bristol, Pennsylvania, USA. In 1948 Poul Anderson graduated magna cum laude in physics, in spite of this he decided to devote himself full time to a writing career. Over the decades, Poul Anderson wrote many novels and short fiction included in its various cycles and other autonomous. When fantasy started being more profitable, Anderson increased his activity in that genre. Together with his wife Karen he wrote the King of Ys series. Poul Anderson died of cancer on July 31, 2001. The many awards received by his works over the decades are just one indication of their value. He’s an author who has been widely appreciated both in the field of science fiction and fantasy and is rightly considered one of the masters of these genres.

Eoconfuciusornis zhengi (Photo courtesy Dr. Xiaoli Wang)

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An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” describes a research on a bird that lived about 130 million years ago called Eoconfuciusornis zhengi. A team of researchers from North Carolina State University, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Linyi University have found in this bird’s known fossil specimen traces of keratin and melanosomes and managed to prove that these are traces of its feathers.