February 2019

Doctor Who - Terror of the Zygons

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“Terror of the Zygons” is the first adventure of the thirteenth season of “Doctor Who” classic series, which aired in 1975. It follows “Revenge of the Cybermen” and it’s a four parts adventure written by Robert Banks Stewart and directed by Douglas Camfield.

The Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) receives a call from Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicolas Courtney) so he brings Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter) back to Earth and precisely to Scotland, near the North Sea. Shortly after their arrival they find out that the call arrived after oil rigs were destroyed and the survivors spotted a giant sea creature.

The Doctor tries to understand the situation and examining some debris from one of the oil rigs destroyed he nitices what look like signs of huge teeth. Soon he and his companions come across the tracks of the Zygon aliens and their Skarasen monster.

Dancing with Bears by Michael Swanwick

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The novel “Dancing with Bears” by Michael Swanwick was published for the first time in 2011. It’s part of the Darger and Surplus series.

Aubrey Darger and his partner Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux nicknamed Surplus managed to devise a trick to get a position on a diplomatic expedition and join a caravan of the Byzantium ambassador to Russia. The caravan transports the Pearls of Byzantium, seven women who were genetically modified to become the perfect brides for the mysterious Duke of Muscovy.

It’s a long journey that is full of dangers but eventually Darger and Surplus arrive to Moscow alive. There they try to be received by the Duke in order to implement their scam against him but it seems that nobody is allowed to see him. Instead, they find themselves entangled in a series of intrigues that also include the demons created with ancient technologies.

Moros intrepidus was a small tyrannosaur that lived 96 million years ago

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An article published in the journal “Communications Biology” reports the identification of a new species of tyrannosauroid, the superfamily of carnivorous dinosaurs the famous T.rex belongs to. A team of researchers examined a very incomplete skeleton dating back to about 96 million years ago and named the species, which lived in today’s Utah, Moros intrepidus. It’s the oldest tyrannosauroid discovered so far in North America and this can help to understand the evolution of these dinosaurs in the larger forms that lived later.

Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Saru (Doug Jones) in The Sounds of Thunder (Image courtesy CBS / Netflix. All rights reserved)

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“The Sounds of Thunder” is the 6th episode of the 2nd season of the TV show “Star Trek: Discovery” and follows “Saints of Imperfection”.

A new signal connected to the mystery of what was called Red Angel is detected by the USS Discovery and comes from the planet Kaminar, homeworld of commander Saru (Doug Jones). This leads to an open confrontation with the mysterious Ba’ul, the other sentient species of the planet, much more technologically advanced than the Kelpien.

Perhaps 2.1 billion years ago there were already multicellular organisms on Earth

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An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” reports the discovery of fossil tunnels that suggest that multicellular organisms existed on Earth already 2.1 billion years ago. A team of researchers studied these tunnels discovered in Gabon, concluding that groups of single cells could aggregate into an organism similar to a tiny slug that could move searching for food. An organism like this would be 1.5 billion years older than the first multicellular organisms known and for this reason the research raised controversy.