July 2018

Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald

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The novel “Luna: New Moon” by Ian McDonald was published for the first time in 2015. It’s the first novel in the Luna series.

Lucasinho Corta and other teenagers complete a rite of passage by surviving a race in the void on the Moon’s surface. To celebrate the feat, his family holds a party attended by representatives of all the “Five Dragons”, the most important families of the Moon. During the party, someone tries to kill Rafa Corta, the family’s heir, and the attack fails thanks to the intervention of an employee, Marina Calzaghe.

While the Corta family tries to discover the author of the attack, Lucasinho runs away while Marina Calzaghe remains involved in the intrigues of the Five Dragons. Adriana Corta, the matriarch of the family, is dying and must think about leaving a stable future with possible alliances with other families trying to avoid the risk that the rivalries result in a war.

Peacemaker by James Swallow

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The novel “Peacemaker” by James Swallow was published for the first time in 2007.

Two guys on horseback reach a normal farm in the Far West and demand that the owner tells them where they can find a mysterious healer. When the man refuses to help them and tries to send them away they kill him using energy weapons and resume their search.

Martha Jones would like to see a western movie but the Tenth Doctor takes her to the real old West, in the town of Redwater. Shortly before, many people in the area were ill with smallpox and risked dying, but a passing physician healed them. He looks like one of the many scammers that existed at that time, but his medicine worked, the problem is that the people who got healed have strange dreams.

Lingwulong shenqi impression

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An article published in the journal “Nature Communications” describes the identification of a new species of sauropod dinosaur that lived in today’s China in the Jurassic period, about 174 million years ago. Named Lingwulong shenqi, this animal was classified into the diplodocoid superfamily by the researchers who studied the partial skeletons of a number of specimens found together in 2005. This discovery indicates that these dinosaurs lived in today’s East Asia before the Pangaea fragmented, arriving there at least 15 million years earlier than previously thought.

Stanley Kubrick in 1971

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Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928 in New York, USA.

In 1949, a work as a photographer connected to a boxing match with Walter Cartier gave Stanley Kubrick the idea for a short film, which he self-produced in 1951. In the following years he shot some more short films that had some success, convincing him to abandon his work as a photographer.

Stanley Kubrick died of a heart attack on March 7, 1999. He’s remembered as an extraordinary director, maniacal in his precision, able to create movies of any genre with great aesthetic sense, great care for music and innovations of various kinds. He left an extraordinary legacy for the whole world of cinema.

Phaeodaria examples (Image courtesy Mike Stukel. All rights reserved)

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An article published in the journal “Limnology and Oceanography” describes a study on the circulation of carbon in the oceans. A team of researchers from Florida State University (FSU) studied the area between 100 and 1,000 meters of depth discovering that very simple organisms belonging to the group called Phaeodarea consume carbon-rich particles that are sinking before they reach the seabed, where they could otherwise be sequestered for millennia. They’re tiny organisms but they could have an impact on the carbon cycle and therefore on climate.