November 2020

Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Adira (Blu del Barrio) in Forget Me Not (Image courtesy CBS / Netflix. All rights reserved)

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“Forget Me Not” is the 4th episode of the 3rd season of the TV show “Star Trek: Discovery” and follows “People of Earth”.

The memory of Adira (Blu del Barrio) is very fragmented and the only hope to unlock it seems in the Trills. The USS Discovery travels to planet Trill, where the welcome is initially good, at least until they find out who the host is. Saru (Doug Jones) tries to help the crew deal with stress with the help of Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz), but it’s a difficult situation.

Gavialimimus almaghribensis fossil

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An article published in the “Journal of Systematic Palaeontology” reports the identification of a new species of mosasaur that lived between 66 and 72 million years ago, in the Cretaceous period. A team of researchers led by Catie Strong, a student in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, Canada, named it Gavialimimus almaghribensis after examining a skull and some bones discovered in a mine in present-day Morocco. The researchers noted the similarities of the teeth with those attributed to Platecarpus ptychodon, another mosasaur whose fossils were discovered in Morocco, but question the taxonomic validity of that species, so they created a whole new genus for the identified species.

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The novel “Damnation Alley” by Roger Zelazny was published for the first time in 1969. It’s an extension of a novella published in 1967.

Hell Tanner is a criminal who’s ruthless even by the standards of the territories that used to be the USA before a nuclear war led to their fragmentation. When he gets caught, he can expect no leniency but is offered the chance to receive a pardon if he agrees to transport a shipment of vaccines from Los Angeles to Boston, where an epidemic is striking the population hard.

Assisted by a crew of volunteers, Hell Tanner drives a group of three armored cars with a large array of weapons of various kinds. The crossing of North America holds a series of dangers in a post-apocalyptic world where the climate has gone mad, geography has been altered, flora and fauna have changed at times monstrously, and there are always other human beings ready to cut the throats to anyone if they think they can get something from them.