June 2017

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On June 5 the second season of the show “Outcast” ended.

The first season of “Outcast” was a success and the show was already renewed on trust before it was even broadcast. The second season started a little earlier and was broadcast in spring as the first one began at the end of spring so most of its episodes were broadcast in summer 2016. The number of episodes was kept at 10.

At the end of the first season, Kyle Barnes attempted to flee from Rome, the West Virginia town where he lives with his daughter Amber, but soon finds groups of possessed people who are essentially guarding the town’s borders. Eventually, he decides to return to the town, where the situation becomes more complicated.

The beginning of the second season immediately marks the change in the show: the protagonists have to face the consequences of the first season’s events but it’s the style that’s different. Simplifying, the first season is in the style of “The Exorcist” while the second one looks more like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”.

The Jagged Orbit by John Brunner (Italian edition)

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The novel “The Jagged Orbit” by John Brunner was published for the first time in 1969. It won the BSFA prize as best novel of the year.

At the beginning of the 21st century, racial segregation in the USA became a total separation but it only exacerbated the tension between black and white with increasingly violent clashes. The Gottschalks, a mix between a lobby and a racket, take advantage of that selling weapons to anyone but leveraging the their clients’s fears they make the situation even worse.

The predictions of the future can be entrusted to sophisticated computers or to people such as Lyla Clay, a pythoness who during a drug-induced trance has visions of the future. For journalist Matthew Flamen, investigating the relationship between the Gottschalks and political power seems a good idea to keep his job.

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Rafael Nadal has won the Roland Garros 2017 title defeating Stan Wawrinka in the final 6-2 6-3 6-1. For the Spanish champion it’s the “Decima”, the tenth title of the French tournament, another piece of the legend of the man who on clay is the greatest player of all time.

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The Japanese telecommunications holding company SoftBank Group Corp. has announced that it has reached an agreement with Alphabet Inc., the holding company Google is part of, to buy the robots producers Boston Dynamics and Schaft for a figure that hasn’t been disclosed. Google bought the two companies in December 2013 as part of a series of acquisitions in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence but something didn’t go well in its plans, which have been modified.

Jebel Irhoud skull's tomographic reconstruction (Image Philipp Gunz, MPI EVA Leipzig)

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Two articles published in the journal “Nature” describe different aspects of a study on various fossil bones including a skull and a jaw uncovered at a site in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. Several researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, studied the bones but also the remains of animals found with them to conclude that those were Homo sapiens of about 300,000 years ago, more than 100,000 years older than the most ancient Homo sapiens fossils so far known.