February 2013
The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks
The novel “The Algebraist” by Iain M. Banks was published for the first time in 2004.
Fassin Taak is a Slow Seer, a scholar who works in the Ulubis star system, which was cut off from the rest of the Mercatoria, a meta-civilization widespread in the Milky Way, after the wormhole connecting the Ulubis system to other stars was destroyed.
Fassin Taak’s task is to study the culture of the Dwellers, the inhabitants of Nasqueron, a gas giant planet in the Ulubis system. These beings are part of an ancient civilization that inhabits gas giant planets and is said to hide many secrets. Taak is enlisted into an organization that’s partly a military intelligence service and partly a religious order to discover one of those secrets, perhaps the only hope to save the inhabitants of the Ulubis system from the invasion of an interstellar fleet.
Dell will be a private company again thanks to a $24.4 billions deal
There had been already rumors for several weeks and yesterday the news became official: Michael Dell (photo ©mikeandryan), founder and CEO of Dell Inc., buys his company back along with equity firm Silver Lake and the participation of Microsoft with $2 billion. The acquisition amounts to a total of $24.4 billions.
NASA is designing a nuclear-powered rocket
NASA stated that a group of researchers at its Marshall Space Flight Center have made a step forward on the road to the production of a nuclear-powered space rocket. The test used non-nuclear material to merely simulate some stress in terms of pressure and temperature that a rocket of this type should bear. Still, the Marshall’s Nuclear Thermal Rocket Element Environmental Simulator (NTREES) is considered a realistic simulator.
