February 2018

Artist's concept of Carboniferous rainforest (Image courtesy Mark Ryan. All rights reserved)

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An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the Royal Society B” describes a research on the changes that occurred during the Carboniferous rainforest collapse. According to a team of scientists led by the British University of Birmingham, a climate change that occurred about 307 million years ago caused a drought that led to the extinction of some groups of tetrapods, the first vertebrates that lived on the mainland, favoring at the same time other groups.

Jules Verne circa 1878

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Jules Gabriel Verne was born on February 8, 1828 in Nantes, France. In the course of his activity as a writer, Jules Verne produced works of various genres but only in 1863 he published the novel “Five weeks in a balloon” (“Cinq semaines en ballon”). The author put together various adventurous elements that characterized his production that put together a sense of wonderful and detailed technical-scientific descriptions.

At the beginning of the 20th century Jules Verne suffered from some serious health problems, including diabetes. Together with his family he had moved to Amiens, where he died on March 24, 1905. Some of his works were published posthumously. For years he was considered above all an author of works for kids and his merits were particularly appreciated by fans of science fiction, a genre that started developing in its modern meaning in the following decades. This author’s importance was fully recognized only with the passage of time.

Entoverse by James P. Hogan

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The novel “Entoverse” by James P. Hogan was published for the first time in 1991. It’s the fourth book of the Giants series and follows “Giants’ Star”.

The shutdown of JEVEX, the supercomputer that ran many activities of the human civilization on the planet Jevlen, seems to have left at least a part of the population in a practically hysterical state. The Thuriens ask the Earthlings for advice to try to understand how to best handle the situation. Victor Hunt once again collaborates with Ganymeans and Thuriens to understand why the Jevlenese society is on the verge of chaos.

A cult is becoming increasingly powerful in its universe but its leaders’ purpose is to gain a foothold on the planet Jevlen. Its followers’ souls must be transferred into Jevlenese bodies in order to act there and slowly take control of their society but to act in a universe that obeys precise physical laws and not magical rules isn’t easy.

Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) in The War Without, The War Within (Image courtesy CBS / Netflix)

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“The War Without, The War Within” is the 14th episode of the TV show “Star Trek: Discovery” and follows “What’s Past Is Prologue”.

Note. This article contains spoilers about “The War Without, The War Within”.

After the contact with the Federation, the USS Discovery is reached by Admiral Katrina Cornwell (Jayne Brook) and Sarek (James Frain). The situation of the war is even worse than that evident for the crew at first sight and requires extreme measures, even desperate, to change it.

Kootenayscolex barbarensis fossil (Image courtesy Jean-Bernard Caron / Royal Ontario Museum)

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An article published in the journal “Current Biology” describes a research on Kootenayscolex barbarensis, a bristle worm (class Polychaeta) that lived about 508 million years ago in the site of today’s Marble Canyon, in the Burgess Shale, Canada. Karma Nanglu and her supervisor Jean-Bernard Caron of the University of Toronto and the Royal Museum of Ontario studied this very ancient annelid. It’s a sea animal although it’s related to the current earthworms. The most important thing is that its discovery provides new information on the origin of the annelids’ head.