2018

John Carpenter in 2010

John Howard Carpenter was born on January 16, 1948 in Carthage, New York, USA. He’s been the director of a number of movies that sometimes had little commercial success but in time became cult movies such as “Dark Star”, “Halloween”, “The Fog”, “Escape from New York”, “The Thing”, “Big Trouble in Little China”, “Prince of Darkness”, and “They Live”.

Keyla Detmer (Emily Coutts) and and Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) in The Wolf Inside (Image courtesy CBS / Netflix)

“The Wolf Inside” is the 11th episode of the TV show “Star Trek: Discovery” and follows “Despite Yourself”.

Note. This article contains spoilers about “The Wolf Inside”.

While the USS Discovery is in the mirror universe, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) is in command of the Shenzhou. A mission to inflict a hard blow to the rebel alliance is an opportunity to gather useful information but for some people looking in the mirror has unexpected consequences.

Fossil scales of Jurassic Butterflies and Moths (Image courtesy van Eldijk et al.)

An article published in the journal “Science Advances” describes the discovery of the oldest fossil remains of lepidoptera, the order of insects that includes butterflies and moths. A team of scientists analyzed soil samples in which Professor Paul K. Strother of Boston College previously identified fossil remains. The dating at about 200 million years ago indicates that those insects existed tens of millions of years before flowering plants, while many previous estimates suggested a possible coevolution between the two groups.

Biocrust in Utah (Photo courtesy Tami Swenson)

An article published in the journal “Nature Communications” describes a research that seeks to understand how communities of very diverse microorganisms that include fungi, bacteria and archaea can adapt to biocrusts, which means in the biological crusts of soil in very dry and arid environments. A team of scientists led by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory tried to understand it using the tools of exometabolomics, a big word that indicates the set of all the products of the metabolism of a biological organism.

Miracle Visitors by Ian Watson (Italian Edition)

The novel “Miracle Visitors” by Ian Watson was published for the first time in 1978.

Michael Peacocke is a boy when he has an alien abduction experience. When psychologist John Deacon subjects him to a hypnotic treatment, the memories of those events emerge fully, but Dr. Deacon interprets them as a distorted sexual fantasy, not believing that they’re real memories.

When strange things start happening to Dr. John Deacon, he’s forced to revise his interpretation of Michael Peacocke’s story. However, the situation seems to get more confusing instead of clearing up. What do these events have to do with an Egyptian religious group?