2017

Orbitsville Judgment by Bob Shaw (Italian edition)

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The novel “Orbitsville Judgement” by Bob Shaw was published for the first time in 1990. It’s the third novel of the Orbitsville series and is the sequel to “Orbitsville Departure”.

Orbitsville has been moved but it’s not clear where it ended and its human inhabitants don’t know who could have done it. For many of them, however, life continues because they always lived only within the immense sphere so for them being in a universe or another is the same.

Jim Nicklin lives a boring and mostly lonely life and his job is repairing home appliances and various machines. By chance he comes across a preacher who thinks that Orbitsville’s move is a sign of divine will. Jim isn’t interested in religion but when the passion for a woman in the congregation breaks out he decides to give up everything and join them.

Patricia Tallman in 2012

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Patricia J. Tallman was born on September 4, 1957 in Pontiac, Illinois, USA. She worked as an actress in a lot of theater, cinema and television productions but often worked as a stuntwoman.

Patricia Tallman’s most famous television role is as Lyta Alexander, played for the first time in “Babylon 5 – The Gathering” (1993), the TV movie that started the TV show “Babylon 5”. The actress resumed her role in some episodes of the show’s second and third seasons then was a regular in the fourth and fifth seasons and in the 1998 TV movie “Babylon 5 – Third Space”.

Images of galaxies taken using gravitational lenses (Image Yashar Hezaveh/Laurence Perreault Levasseur/Phil Marshall/Stanford/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; NASA/ESA)

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the application of neural networks to gravitational lensing. A team of researchers reduced from a few weeks to a few seconds the time needed to analyze complex space distortions in images captured thanks to gravitational lenses. This could greatly facilitate this type of task with great benefits for astronomical research.

Ichthyosaurus somersetensis (Image courtesy Dean Lomax)

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An article published in the magazine “Acta Palaeontologica Polonica” describes the identification of a specimen of Ichthyosaurus somersetensis that was found to be a pregnant female. Paleontologists Dean Lomax of the British University of Manchester and Sven Sachs of the German Naturkundemuseum Bielefeld studied this almost 3.5-meter (11 feet) long ichthyosaur that was discovered in Somerset in the 1990s, where it lived about 200 million years ago then ended up in the collection of the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum in Saxony, forgotten until recently.

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An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” describes a simulation of the events that led to the mass extinction of the end of the Creataceous period, which also led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. A team of researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), in Boulder, Colorado, and NASA used a computer model to find out what climatic conditions followed an asteroid impact.