2018

Flashback by Dan Simmons

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The novel “Flashback” by Dan Simmons was published for the first time in 2011.

Nick Bottom is a former Denver cop who’s become addicted to flashback, a drug that allows him to relive his memories as if they were real, to keep alive the presence of his wife Dara, who died a few years earlier in a car accident. For this reason, his teenage son Val went to live in Los Angeles with his maternal grandfather Leonard Fox.

Despite his problems, Nick Bottom is still considered a good detective and the Japanese billionaire Hiroshi Nakamura hires him to solve the case of his son’s murder, which happened six years earlier and remained unsolved. Information that were kept secret by Nakamura at the time gave Nick a new trace which, however, has very personal implications.

Graphene Roll (Image courtesy Christine Daniloff, MIT. All rights reserved)

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An article published in the journal “Applied Materials and Interfaces” describes a scalable process to produce graphene sheets relatively cheaply and quickly, with speeds of 5 centimeters per minute. A team of MIT researchers applied a technique based on chemical vapor deposition to synthesize high-quality graphene of uniform quality. This process allows to create graphene with nanopores, microscopic holes of the desired size to use it as a filter.

A possible moment during the Carnian Pluvial Episode (Image courtesy Davide Bonadonna. All rights reserved)

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An article published in the journal “Nature Communications” describes a research on the link between the dinosaur diversification that took place at the end of the Triassic period and an event known as the Carnian Pluvial Episode, which occurred around 232-234 million years ago. According to a team of researchers, in the middle of that period of climate change, dinosaurs started thriving, evolving into many different species, also taking advantage of the extinction of other animals.

Dr. Henry Goodsir (Paul Ready) in First Shot a Winner, Lads (Image courtesy AMC Studios / Amazon. All rights reserved)

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“First Shot a Winner, Lads” is the fifth episode of the TV show “The Terror”, an adapatation of a novel by Dan Simmons with the same title, and follows “Punished, as a Boy”.

Note. This article contains spoilers about “First Shot a Winner, Lads”.

Dr. Henry Goodsir (Paul Ready) tries to learn the Inuit language from Lady Silence (Nive Nielsen) to get information about the creature that is slowly killing the crew but eventually he and some officers only manage to get a name, Tuunbaq. Captain Francis Crozier (Jared Harris) seems more interested in how much whiskey is left to drink.

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Warning. This review contains several spoilers about the eighth season of the TV show “The Walking Dead”!

On april 15 the eighth season of the show “The Walking Dead” ended.

The eighth season was produced and broadcast with the format has become usual: 16 episodes of which 8 were broadcast between October and December 2017 and the other 8 between February and April 2018. The ratings drop seen in the seventh season has definitely increased, so much so that, if we don’t consider DVRs, compared to the sixth season’s records the ratings have practically halved.

Last year that drop could be a sign that many people were getting tired of the show. This year it’s a clear sign that something really isn’t working anymore. Is that the quality drop? Is that the disappointment for the development of the last story-arcs with respect to their premises? Is that combination of both?

The seventh season of “The Walking Dead” ended with a clash of the Alexandria, Hilltop and the Kingdom’s alliance with Negan’s Saviors. As it was clear right away, it was only the beginning of a story-arc that filled the whole eighth season in which the war between the two factions was developed.