November 2022

The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson

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The novel “The Wild Shore” by Kim Stanley Robinson was published for the first time in 1984. It’s the first book in the trilogy of the Three Californias.

For the inhabitants of a small Californian community that makes a living mainly from fishing, life is tough but generally quiet. However, people from San Diego, which is practically a metropolis in post-atomic California, propose an alliance to rebuild the USA despite the quarantine imposed by other nations.

Community members like old Tom Barnard prefer to continue their normal life but young people like Hank Fletcher and especially his friend Steve Nicolin are very interested. The idea of ​​returning to what for them is a golden age is irresistible to many young people.

Gangtoucunia aspera

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An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences” reports a study on specimens in an exceptional state of conservation of Gangtoucunia aspera, a primitive animal that lived during the Cambrian period, just over 500 million years ago. A team of researchers examined new fossils attributed to this species that included their soft tissues. This made it possible to study the first animals that had developed a skeleton and concluded that they were related to today’s phylum of cnidarians, in particular, the scyphozoans (class Scyphozoa), which include the larger jellyfish.