August 2014

Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton

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The novel “Great North Road” by Peter F. Hamilton was published for the first time in 2012.

The year 2143 begins in a complicated way for Newcastle police detective Sidney Hurst when he arrives on a murder scene. The victim is a member of the powerful North family, which means that it’s a very high profile case. The case quickly becomes more complicated when the wounds suffered by the victim turn out to be the same as those found in a murder that took place twenty years earlier, perpetrated on the planet St Libra, in which one of the victims was one of the most important members of the North family.

Angela Tramelo, who was convicted for that old multiple murder, always claimed that the real culprit was an alien but wasn’t believed because no one found traces of alien presences on the crime scene. The case gets reopened and Angela is put in the custody of the Human Defence Alliance (HDA), which plans to start an expedition to St Libra to investigate a possible alien presence that could threaten the largest producer of bio-fuel and maybe the whole of humanity.

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It will be about 11:16 Pacific Time in the USA when the old ISEE-3 (International Sun / Earth Explorer 3) space probe, also known as ICE (International Cometary Explorer) will fly by the Moon. The team of the ISEE-3 Reboot project will follow the flyby and anyone can watch an animation on the Internet thanks to Google, that among its experiments has created a website dedicated to this probe.

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Google has published a paper about Mesa, its new data warehousing system, used specifically to handle its online advertising business data. It’s a system used to create reports and analyzes for the company mangers. Due to the enormous amounts of data managed globally by Google, it’s a very complex system, requiring something more than other systems created by Google over the years.

IBM SyNAPSE 16-chip board (Image courtesy International Business Machines. All rights reserved)

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IBM has revealed its new neurosynaptic chip, which reproduces at least partially the brain’s synapses. It’s the culmination of six years of development in collaboration with DARPA in the SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics) project. The chip called TrueNorth was produced with the 28nm process, contains 5.4 billion transistors and the innovative element is that it contains 4096 neurosynaptic cores with one million neurons and 256 million synapses but at the same time consumes only 70 mW during its operations.

The Price of Paradise by Colin Brake

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The novel “The Price of Paradise” by Colin Brake was published for the first time in 2006.

The Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler are attracted to a planet by a distress signal sent by a starship that fell down after being hit by a powerful electromagnetic pulse. It’s a scientific expedition led by Professor Petra Shulough, who is looking for the planet Laylora, a legendary paradise where the inhabitants live in harmony with nature.

The humanoids native to the planet see with surprise the arrival of a starship. It’s not the first time someone comes to their planet: years before, other aliens came and a baby was left, who grew up together with the natives. For them, the concern is the fact that the arrival of other aliens concides with a series of earthquakes and the appearance of monstrous creatures, as if the world was reacting to the arrival of strangers.