2018

Saltriovenator zanellai available bones (Image G. Bindellini / C. Dal Sasso / M. Zilioli / M. Auditore)

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An article published in the journal “PeerJ” describes the study of a carnivorous dinosaur of which a partial skeleton was discovered in 1996 near Saltrio, in the Varese province, about 80 kilometer North-East of Milan, Italy. Named Saltriovenator zanellai, it was classified as a part of the group of ceratosaurs, medium-large carnivorous dinosaurs, by Cristiano Dal Sasso, Simone Maganuco and Andrea Cau. It lived almost 200 million years ago and this makes it the oldest ceratosaurus discovered so far and with an estimated length of about 7.5 meters (about 25 feet) and probably at least one ton of weight it’s the largest theropod dinosaur of the time. Its characteristics offer information on birds’ three-fingered hands.

Pterosaur pycnofibres (Image courtesy Yang et al. All rights reserved)

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An article published in the journal “Nature Ecology & Evolution” reports the discovery of two specimens of pterosaur that lived in today’s China about 165-160 million years ago, during the Jurassic period, that had filaments called pycnofibres that make up a plumage. A team of researchers studied under the microscope those pycnofibres finding four different types of feathers, concluding that they’re very similar to those of birds and those found in feathered dinosaur fossils.

Political travails of Time travel by Gouthama Siddarthan

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“Political travails of Time travel” (“Kaalap payana Arasiyal”) by Gouthama Siddarthan was published for the first time in 2018 with the English version translated from the Tamil by Maharathi.

Partly an essay on time travel, partly a commentary on two short stories on the subject by two masters of science fiction such as Ray Bradbury and Alfred Bester with the addition of some touch of fantasy, “Political travails of Time travel” is a unique work for the intertwining of its various parts. Gouthama Siddarthan starts from Stephen Hawking and an Indian folklore story about a tree of time to make some reflection between the serious and the facetious about the nature of time.

Apex by Ramez Naam

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The novel “Apex” by Ramez Naam was published for the first time in 2015. It’s the third book of the Nexus trilogy and follows “Crux”. It won the Philip K. Dick Award.

Kaden “Kade” Lane has written out the Nexus backdoor that can allow some attacker who discovers it to literally take possession of people who installed it into their brains but he must find ways to spread the update. To do so, he must first avoid ending up in the American government’s hands and his hope could come from India.

In the USA the presidential election time has come, a vote that will determine the future as it rarely happened during the nation’s history. President John Stockton is determined to be re-elected and to maintain strict anti-Nexus laws, but the secret of the lab in which experiments were carried out on children with Nexus leaked triggering strong protests with a faction willig to add to the chaos. A new front is opened with China with mutual accusations of interference in domestic politics, who’s interested in a clash between the two nations?

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Philip Kindred Dick was born on December 16, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. From the beginning of his career, Philip K. Dick offered his readers stories in which the boundary between reality and appearance is very thin or even reality is anything but certain such as “Eye in the Sky” (1957), “Time Out of Joint” (1959), “The Man in the High Castle” (1962), winner of the Hugo Award, and “The Penultimate Truth” (1964). From this point of view “Ubik” (1969) represents in some ways his peak.

In the early 1980s Philip K. Dick worked on the screenplay for “Blade Runner” but died on March 2, 1982 after a stroke. At his request, he was buried next to his twin sister. After his death his fame grew noticeably with a new wave of reprints of his novels, the publication of some that had remained unpublished when he was alive and the production of movies and TV shows adapted from his works. Dick has become an object of study, also as a precursor of postmodernism, with a reputation that has long gone far beyond the science fiction genre.