Lifeboat Foundation

Seeqc, a startup that is part of a relatively new class of quantum computing companies that is looking at how to best use classical computing to manage quantum processors, today announced that it has raised $5 million from M Ventures, the strategic corporate venture capital arm of Merck, the German pharmaceutical giant. Merck will be a strategic partner for Seeqc and will help it to develop its R&D efforts to develop useful application-specific quantum computers.

With this, New York state-based Seeqc has now raised a total of $11 million, including a recent $6.8 million seed round that included BlueYard Capital, Cambium, NewLab and the Partnership Fund for New York City.

Since developing new pharmaceuticals is an obvious use case for quantum computing, it makes sense that large pharmaceutical companies are trying to get ahead of their competitors by making strategic investments in companies like Seeqc.

The Nordic country has a much higher fatality rate than its neighbors.

An Israeli scientist is urging people to ask a simple question daily to save lives from coronavirus: can I smell? There is widespread confusion about how to identify coronavirus symptoms, as several of them are similar to symptoms of flu and the common cold. But Noam Sobel says that there is one highly unusual pattern, a sudden inability to smell, and he has built a website to help people keep tabs on their odor-assessing abilities. People are signing up from all over the world, at an average rate of 200 per hour.

Smell garlic and toothpaste and save lives from coronavirus: It’s not a folk cure, but a Weizmann Institute initiative, and 200 people an hour are joining.

In another verification of the validity of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, published in Nature Photonics, scientists from the RIKEN Center for Advanced Photonics and Cluster for Pioneering Research, with colleagues, have used two finely tuned optical lattice clocks, one at the base and one on the 450-meter observatory floor of Tokyo Skytree, to make new ultraprecise measurements of the time dilation effect predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Einstein theorized that the warping of time-space by gravity was caused by massive objects. In line with this, time runs more slowly in a deep gravitational field than in a shallower one. This means that times runs slightly more slowly at the base of the Skytree tower than at the top.

The difficulty with actually measuring the change in how quickly clocks run in different gravity field is that the difference is very small. Performing a stringent test of the theory of relativity requires either a very precise clock or a large difference in height. One of the best measurements so far has involved large and complex clocks such as those developed by the RIKEN group, which can measure a difference of around a centimeter in height. Outside the laboratory, the best tests have been taken by satellites, with altitudes that are thousands of kilometers different. Such space experiments have constrained any violation of general relativity to about 30 parts per million, a tremendously precise measurement that essentially shows Einstein to be correct.

By ignoring their goals, evolutionary algorithms have solved longstanding challenges in artificial intelligence.

The doctor added that the virus has “outsmarted all of us,” since he says it’s able to hide symptoms for up to 24 days — which contradicts current guidance that the incubation period is two weeks.

Chinese doctors sounding the alarm on the coronavirus say the illness could be even deadlier for patients who catch it again, according to a report.

The whistleblowing physicians working to fight the virus in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, revealed that medically cleared patients have been getting reinfected, the Taiwan News reported.

Continue reading “Whistleblower doctors say coronavirus reinfection even deadlier” »

Chip maker Intel has been chosen to lead a new initiative led by the U.S. military’s research wing, DARPA, aimed at improving cyber-defenses against deception attacks on machine learning models.

Machine learning is a kind of artificial intelligence that allows systems to improve over time with new data and experiences. One of its most common use cases today is object recognition, such as taking a photo and describing what’s in it. That can help those with impaired vision to know what’s in a photo if they can’t see it, for example, but it also can be used by other computers, such as autonomous vehicles, to identify what’s on the road.

But deception attacks, although rare, can meddle with machine learning algorithms. Subtle changes to real-world objects can, in the case of a self-driving vehicle, have disastrous consequences.

The global race to make a vaccine and treatment for the Covid-19 coronavirus is well underway as the epicenter of the pandemic is now shifting toward the United States.

Many of the vaccine and drug development efforts are building on past efforts to deal with other viral outbreaks, including coronaviruses like MERS and SARS — which means researchers had a head start with Covid-19. In the US, a phase 1 clinical trial of a vaccine is already underway.

Since the original work on Bose–Einstein condensation^1,2, the use of quantum degenerate gases of atoms has enabled the quantum emulation of important systems in condensed matter and nuclear physics, as well as the study of many-body states that have no analogue in other fields of physics³. Ultracold molecules in the micro- and nanokelvin regimes are expected to bring powerful capabilities to quantum emulation⁴ and quantum computing⁵, owing to their rich internal degrees of freedom compared to atoms, and to facilitate precision measurement and the study of quantum chemistry⁶. Quantum gases of ultracold atoms can be created using collision-based cooling schemes such as evaporative cooling, but thermalization and collisional cooling have not yet been realized for ultracold molecules. Other techniques, such as the use of supersonic jets and cryogenic buffer gases, have reached temperatures limited to above 10 millikelvin^7,8. Here we show cooling of NaLi molecules to micro- and nanokelvin temperatures through collisions with ultracold Na atoms, with both molecules and atoms prepared in their stretched hyperfine spin states. We find a lower bound on the ratio of elastic to inelastic molecule–atom collisions that is greater than 50—large enough to support sustained collisional cooling. By employing two stages of evaporation, we increase the phase-space density of the molecules by a factor of 20, achieving temperatures as low as 220 nanokelvin. The favourable collisional properties of the Na–NaLi system could enable the creation of deeply quantum degenerate dipolar molecules and raises the possibility of using stretched spin states in the cooling of other molecules.