December 2018

Dark Light by Ken MacLeod (Italian edition)

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The novel “Dark Light” by Ken MacLeod was published for the first time in 2002. It’s the second book in the Engines of Light Trilogy and follows “Cosmonaut Keep”.

When the spaceship Bright Star arrives on the planet Croatan, the consequences are immediate. The fact that it was piloted by human beings and not by kraken is for many inhabitants a blasphemy against the gods. The authorities seize the Bright Star and for Matt Cairns, his descendant Gregor, Lydia de Tenebre and Salasso, there’s also the problem of understanding local laws and customs.

The planet Croatan is part of the Second Sphere, a group of star systems inhabited by various sentient species. That’s the will of the gods and the idea that Matt Cairns and his fellow travelers go against it is a big problem for them but they want to speak directly to one of the gods to obtain clear answers.

Perhaps inosine was one of the components of the first life forms on Earth

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An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” describes a study on the possible precursors of RNA. A team of Harvard University biologists led by Nobel Prize laureate Jack Szostak is trying to reconstruct the various steps that led to the birth of life with lab experiments and an interesting result came from the use of inosine as a surrogate for guanine, one of the RNA and also DNA bases.

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A California district court has approved a settlement between the PC manufacturer Lenovo and a group of customers to wrap up a class action that began after an adware that caused a serious vulnerability had been discovered on various Lenovo laptop models. The laptop maker will pay a total of $7.3 million while Superfish, the producer of the adware, will pay another million dollars to close the litigation for good.

Neanderthal and Modern human skulls (photo ©hairymuseummatt)

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An article published in the journal “Nature Ecology & Evolution” describes a research on the number of interbreedings between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. Fernando A. Villanea and Joshua G. Schraiber of the Temple University offered evidence to support the thesis of multiple interbreedings. Fabrizio Mafessoni of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, published in the same journal a commentary on that research, pointing out that this thesis is in agreement with the increasing evidence of interbreedings between different hominids.