If you are a horror fiend, then you will no doubt have acid blood coursing through your veins in anticipation of #RidleyScott's #AlienCovenant. The second in Scott's planned Alien prequel trilogy, the film reunites #MichaelFassbender with the venomous Xenomorphs, and tools us a new crew for doom in deepest space.

The Millennial generation has so much choice, so many life chances and so much technology at the finger tips, they have become the object of hate and ridicule from previous generations. The stereotypical Millennial survives on little more than Wi-Fi and coffee-infused youthful energy. But above all else, Millennials are dependent on social media and their smartphones.

Series note: As technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, Big Data and mixed reality start to blur the line between science and science fiction, some of the most exciting developments are coming from startup companies operating at the frontiers of innovation. Over the next few weeks, I'll be profiling a few of the companies chipping away at problems big and small, helping to make the future real for consumers and businesses.

It’s just one of those things which you hardly think about until it happens to you. You know how to minimise the chances of it occurring but you couldn’t be bothered to take precautions. You think: “Well, if it really happens, I know what to do anyway. No sweat.” Then it happened to me.

A recent New York Times article highlighted a system and part of the criminal justice system that most people aren’t aware of; Risk Management Systems and their use in sentencing convicted offenders, predicting recidivism rates, and even working to the likelihood of children to become criminal offenders later in life. Tools such as these are based in the sciences of Predictive Analytics, Behavioral Analysis, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning.

If you are like me, you have a stream of information coming at you from all your social media accounts, mostly about things you have liked and are interested in. Like sucking down a mint chocolate chip milkshake too fast and getting that brain freeze, we continue to do it because it fills that instant void. When is too much of a good thing too much? I’ll use the example of the upcoming movie Ghost in the Shell as the example.

My first viewing of A Clockwork Orange 30 years ago left me lost on the message. A hardened criminal receives the opportunity for a quick, psychologically based reform, but the dehumanizing treatment endured almost makes his crimes seem forgivable. Not sure who to side with and put off by the chaotic presentation, I was indifferent. Nonetheless, a later more open-minded viewing got my nod, but the ideological mish-mash remained, and a meaningful critique here, would require the insight of others.

Some years ago, when I was a little younger but just as peculiar, I was a general surgeon more interested in why people got sick than in cutting them—and equally interested in why they got well. Eventually, I decided that if I were to get any of my crazy ideas accepted, I'd have to become a psychiatrist. So I started hunting for a psychiatry residency. I was interviewed by one eminent gentleman and incidentally expressed my belief that anger and depression were important mechanisms in the induction of cancer. He sneered, not very politely, and said, "Every weekend we get at least a dozen nuts in the emergency room who have figured out what causes cancer." I asked, "What do they say?" His reply, which I treasure, was, "We ignore them... we have better things to do."

Frank Herbet was born in 1920. Growing up during the Great Depression, his young mind could envision worlds and histories that no man had walked on and no civilization had experienced. But even the prophetic visions he had did not foretell the social media age; a period in which his imagination would become indelibly etched into the digital universe. A period in which Tumblr, Facebook, and Pinterest would preserve and evolve the worlds he created.