February 2022

Rene Haas

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The leading graphics processor company NVIDIA and the Japanese telecommunications holding SoftBank Group Corp. have reached an agreement to end the deal to acquire the British microprocessor company Arm Ltd. that was reached in September 2020. Negative or at least concerned opinions expressed repeatedly over time by the USA, UK, and EU antitrust authorities resulted in NVIDIA’s inability to proceed with the acquisition. Arm CEO Simon Segars resigned and was replaced by Rene Haas, who was already the company’s president. The new plan consists of an IPO for Arm, perhaps at the London stock exchange.

The Corporation Wars: Emergence by Ken MacLeod

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The novel “The Corporation Wars: Emergence” by Ken MacLeod was published for the first time in 2017. It’s the third book in The Corporation Wars trilogy and follows “The Corporation Wars: Insurgence”.

A superhabitable planet is at the center of a war involving a number of really uneven factions. DisCorporations, free bots, mechanoids, artificial intelligences, form a complex network of alliances whose members are involved in a much larger struggle.

A fascist faction has conquered the exomoon SH-119 and uses enslaved sentient robots to exploit its considerable resources, opening another front of the war. Carlos the Terrorist wakes up another time and finds himself again in the midst of a clash in which he needs to understand who are the allies and who the enemies.

The vertebra found in the Ubeidiya site

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An article published in the journal “Scientific Reports” reports the attribution of a vertebra to the genus Homo with an estimated age of about 1.5 million years in the archaeological site of Ubeidiya, in today’s Israel. A team of researchers examined the fossil vertebra and compared it with other Eurasian hominin fossils from the Pleistocene period. The paleobiological differences led them to conclude that there were several migratory waves from Africa that correspond to the different stone working techniques discovered in archaeological studies.