June 2019

Artist's concept of Pachystruthio dmanisensis in its environment (Image Andrey Atuchin)

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An article published in the “Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology” reports the identification of an extinct giant bird that lived in the Pleistocene period carried out thanks to the analysis of a fossil discovered in Crimea and other bones. A team of researchers led by Dr. Nikita Zelenkov of the Russian Academy of Sciences named it Pachystruthio dmanisensis attributing it to an existing genus of extinct birds. This is a different conclusion than the one based on the first fossil femur of this species, which in 1990 led other researchers to attribute the species to the genus Struthio, the same as ostriches. However, this animal was much larger given that the researchers estimated that it could be about 3.5 meters (about 11.5′) tall and weigh around 450 kg (about 1,000 lbs).

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The short story “The Smog Society” by Chen Qiufan was published for the first time in 2010.

Lao Sun is a retired man who collaborates with what’s commonly called “The Smog Society”, an environmental non-governmental organization that among other things takes car of collecting data on the city’s smog. The analysis of the data collected leads to the conclusion that there’s a correlation between smog and the inhabitants’ happiness but the terms of that correlation are surprising.

Charles Paradis with a soil core sample (Photo courtesy Lance E. King/Y-12 National Security Complex. All rights reserved)

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An article published in the journal “Nature Communications” reports the first use of a technique called BONCAT+FACS to isolate the active microbes present in a soil sample. A team of scientists led by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) adapted a technique developed to isolate proteins produced in cells to transform it into a tool that could identify single active microbes. This will help to understand in new details parts of ecosystems difficult to investigate, also obtaining information on large-scale cycles existing in the environment.

Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey (Italian edition)

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The novel “Nemesis Games” by James S.A. Corey was published for the first time in 2015. It’s the fifth book in the Expanse series and follows “Cibola Burn”.

The Rocinante is back to the solar system with rather extensive damage, which will take a long time to be repaired. Amos Burton discovers that a woman who was important to him has died and decides to go to Earth to say goodbye to her. Alex Kamal takes advantage of the break to go to Mars and try to reconnect with his family. Naomi Nagata decides to go to Ceres, where she receives a message connected to a person from her past.

While overseeing the Rocinante’s repairs, James Holden is contacted by journalist Monica Stuart, who is investigating a series of missing spaceships. It0s not at all easy to trace the movements of spaceships when they can pass through a portal that allows access to another area of space transporting people in search of a new life on one of the planets open to colonization. The exodus is seen as a threat by an extremist OPA faction.

An abundance of Archaea in sediments beneath the ocean floor

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An article published in the journal “Science Advances” reports an abundance of ammonia-oxidizing archaea in microbial communities in sediments beneath the seafloor of the North Atlantic Ocean. A team of researchers led by William Orsi of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich, Germany, discovered that archaea not only survived for millions of years in sediments that can reach over two kilometers below the ocean floor but adapted to those conditions better than bacteria and could play an important role in the geochemical cycles of carbon and nitrogen in that ecosystem.