May 2017

The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells (Italian edition)

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The novel “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells was published for the first time in 1895. It’s freely available on Project Gutenberg’s website.

The Time Traveller tells his friends that he has built a machine that can travel in time as if it were a space-like dimension. He’s not believed but a few days later he arrives to a dinner at his home with very messy clothes, various wounds and looking very upset.

His friends ask the Time Traveller what happened to him and he starts telling the story of his journey in the year 802,701, made thanks to the machine he invented. At that time so far in the future he met little human beings called the Eloi, who spend their time playing, but also the Morlock, ape-like creatures who live in the underground.

Simulation of Tyrannosaurus rex anatomy (Image courtesy Gregory Erickson e Paul Gignac / Florida State University/Oklahoma State University / Scientific Reports)

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An article published in the journal “Scientific Reports” describes a research on the bite force of Tyrannosaurus rex. Researchers Gregory Erickson and Paul Gignac created computer models based not only on fossils but also on the study of dinosaurs’ living relatives, crocodiles and birds, to estimate T.rex’s bite characteristics concluding that it could crush its prey’s bones.

The Machine prototype (Photo courtesy HPE. All rights reserved)

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) presented a prototype of “The Machine”, the computer of the future announced in June 2014. It is a single-memory computer, which means it exceeds the division between RAM and mass memory with its 160 TB (TeraByte) memory, more than that of servers. However, this is not a memtor, the technology being developed that should best combine the benefits of RAM and mass memory.

Zuul crurivastator Skull (Photo courtesy Brian Boyle/Royal Ontario Museum)

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An article published in the journal “Royal Society Open Science” describes the study of a dinosaur called Zuul crurivastator that lived about 75 million years ago in today’s Montana, USA. It’s an Anchilosaurus, a group of armored herbivores that appeared during the Jurassic period that lived until the end of the Cretaceous. The name Zuul is inspired by the monster of the movie “Ghostbusters” because the discoverers saw some similarities with it.

2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke (Italian edition)

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The novel “2010: Odyssey Two” by Arthur C. Clarke was published for the first time in 1982. It’s the second book of the Odyssey series in space and the sequel to “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

Nine years have passed since the Discovery spaceship’s disaster and on Earth no one yet knows what really happened. The observations indicate that its orbit has become unstable with the prospect that it might falls to Jupiter. Its destruction would mean losing any hope of finding out what happened to the expedition.

For the USA it’s impossible to set up a rescue mission that could arrive in time while the USSR has already been setting one up for some time. Heywood Floyd and Dr. Chandra, the creator of HAL 9000, leave on the spaceship Leonov to Jupiter, where the Discovery is waiting for them but also the version of the monolith larger than that discovered on the Moon.