2019

0

The short story “The Night Train” by Lavie Tidhar was published for the first time in 2010.

Mulan Rouge – but that’s only an old stage name that got stuck to her – is a former mercenary and now bodyguard of the Old Man, also known as Boss Gui, the head and bigfalla bos of the Kunming Toads. The Old Man has to leave for a train journey and Mulan must check that no other passenger is a danger to him. Being the Old Man’s bodyguard is a dangerous job but for Mulan there’s not only the risk in her life and she thinks of Darwin’s Choice, an Other she had a relationship with.

Saturn Run by John Sandford and Ctein (Italian edition)

1

The novel “Saturn Run” by John Sandford and Ctein was published for the first time in 2015.

At Caltech everyone has little consideration for Sandy because they think he was hired only because his family is very rich but when he’s the one who realizes that in astronomical observations an object that is approaching Saturn and is slowing down has appeared, he ends up involved in the investigation on it. There’s no doubt that this is an artificial object and the American authorities want to send a mission hoping to contact anyone who’s traveling on that starship and at the same time to keep their discovery secret.

China has been organizing for years a manned mission to Mars but the Chinese also end up discovering the presence of an alien starship in the solar system. The Chinese plans get changed in a hurry to send their mission to Saturn with the goal of arriving there before the Americans. Between the two nations a new phase of their rivalry begins and the prize for the winner could consist in obtaining from the aliens technologies that are much more advanced than those developed by humans.

Staphylococcus aureus (Image Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library (PHIL))

0

An article published in the journal “mSystems” describes a research on the adaptations of bacteria of the species Bacillus cereus and Staphylococcus aureus found on the International Space Station. A team of researchers led by Erica Hartmann of Northwestern University compared 189 genomes isolated from various origins to understand the influence of what are called built environments, human products that modify the natural environment. In the Station’s case, it’s an extreme environment and yet no dangerous mutations were detected such as resistance to antibiotics but they developed adaptations to difficult conditions.

Protoichthyosaurus prostaxalis during a CT-scan (Photo courtesy University of Manchester. All rights reserved)

0

An article published in the journal “PeerJ” describes the examination of the specimen of a marine reptile that lived during the Jurassic period, about 200 million years ago. A team of researchers submitted it to an advanced CT-scan that allowed to examine it in depth and to conclude that it belongs to the species Protoichthyosaurus prostaxalis while originally it was identified as a specimen of Ichthyosaurus communis.

IBM Q System One (Photo courtesy International Business Machines Corporation. All rights reserved)

0

At CES, IBM announced its first commercial 20-qubit quantum computer called IBM Q System One and the IBM Q Quantum Computation Center for its business customers. For some years IBM has been developing its own IBM Q quantum systems, also thanks to tests conducted allowing its customers the access to them via cloud and offering the possibility to develop specific applications, now the company has announced a system declaring a reliability comparable to that of a classic mainframe.