February 2015

Researcher Risa Nishiyama with Pepper robot using IBM Watson during a demonstration

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IBM and SoftBank Telecom Corp., a subsidiary of SoftBank Corp, announced a deal to bring the cognitive computing system Watson to Japan. This collaboration will lead Watson to learn Japanese. Among the possible ways to interact with people there could also be a robot named Pepper.

It seems that IBM is trying to develop applications for Watson in all fields. The company is working even in the medical assisting doctors and researchers in the field of research and treatment of cancer. Its main uses are, however, in business, with various forms of assistance to employees and customers. The agreement with SoftBank goes in this direction.

Arduino Uno, one of the Arduino boards (Photo Arduino)

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Arduino is one of the most famous makers of the world, meaning one of the representatives of the culture of do-it-yourself electronics, thanks to its open hardware cards. It’s an Italian company which however is becoming more and more international with the opening of branches in Shanghai, Japan and the USA.

The Arduino project was born in 2005 with educational purposes. The founders of the project met in a bar in Ivrea called Arduino, as Arduino of Ivrea, king of Italy between 1002 and 1014. Over the years, they produced cards with various features whose purpose went well beyond the educational one.

Arduino boards are open hardware so the circuit layouts are available and anyone can create clones or variants. This allowed the creation of an ecosystem of both hardware and software because both enthusiasts and professionals have started using Arduino in many different ways writing software released as open source.

The Eternal Flame by Greg Egan

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The novel “The Eternal Flame” by Greg Egan was published for the first time in 2012. It’s the second book in the Orthogonal trilogy and is the sequel to “The Clockwork Rocket”.

The generational starship Peerless is traveling in space in search of a technology that can save its crew’s homeworld. The advantage is that the time on the starship flows much slowly than on the planet. The problem is that it doesn’t carry enough fuel for the return trip and to make things worse there’s the problem of the limits of the resources for the crew survival.

While the scientists within the crew are looking for the solutions to their problems, the astronomer Tamara discovers an object in space. An expedition could find new fuel but involves several risks. Meanwhile, new biological studies risk creating a rift in the small society that lives on the Peerless.

A rock containing 2.3 billion years old bacteria fossils, visible in dark areas (Image courtesy J. William Schopf/UCLA Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. All rights reserved)

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An international team of researchers discovered a type of deep-sea microorganism that appears to have remained unchanged for over 2 billion years. There are many species considered living fossils because they remained very similar in the course of many million of years but this is a really extreme case. Those are sulfu-cycling microorganisms that are now found in mud off the coast of Chile and are indistinguishable from fossils that date back to different past eras.

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The story “The Quantum Mommy” (“Armelina II”) by Michalis Manolios was published for the first time in 2005. It was translated from the greek by Manolis Vamvounis.

The mother ship Europa II has reached Europa, Jupiter’s satellite, and deployed the Hope spacecraft to its surface. Armelina is ready to be teleported inside Europa II for a three-month mission. After greeting her daughter Agape, she enters the teleport cabin but something strange happens: Armelina arrives at her destination and at the same time is still on Earth after being replicated.