Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at Tel Aviv University say they have developed a new, noninvasive method of discovering genetic disorders that can let parents find out the health of their fetus as early as 11 weeks into pregnancy.

A simple blood test lets doctors diagnose genetic disorders in fetuses early in pregnancy by sequencing small amounts of DNA in the mother’s and the father’s blood. A computer algorithm developed by the researchers analyzes the results of the sequencing and then produces a “map” of the fetal genome, predicting mutations with 99 percent or better accuracy, depending on the mutation type, the researchers said in a study published Wednesday in Genome Research.

The algorithm is able to distinguish between the genetic material of the parents and that of the fetus, said Prof. Noam Shomron of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine led the research, in a phone interview with The Times of Israel.

Continue reading “Israeli team develops way to find genetic flaws in fetus at 11 weeks” »

Fake. Dangerous. Scary. Too good. When headlines swim with verdicts like those then you suspect, correctly, that you’re in the land of artificial intelligence, where someone has come up with yet another AI model.

So, this is, GPT-2, an algorithm and, whether it makes one worry or marvel, “It excels at a task known as language modeling,” said The Verge, “which tests a program’s ability to predict the next word in a given sentence.”

Depending on how you look at it, you can blame, or congratulate, a team at California-based OpenAI who created GPT-2. Their language modeling program has written a convincing essay on a topic which they disagreed with.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s GPT-2 algorithm is good in knitting fake news” »

Circa 2014

Scientists may soon create matter entirely from light, using technology that is already available to complete a quest 80 years in the making.

The experiment would re-create events that were critical in the first 100 seconds of the universe and that are also expected to happen in gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the cosmos and one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in physics, researchers added.

Continue reading “Turning Light into Matter May Soon Be Possible” »

The Longevity Therapeutics Summit was focused on therapeutics that target aging, rather than basic research or theory.

This was the first year for the Longevity Therapeutics Summit in San Francisco, California. Ably organized by Hanson Wade, with John Lewis, CEO of Oisín Biotechnologies, as program chair, the conference focused on senolytics for senescent cell clearance, big data and AI in finding new drugs (“in silico” testing), delivery systems for therapeutics like senolytics, TORC1 drugs, and biomarkers of aging, and the challenges of clinical trial development and FDA approval.

The conference featured a smorgasbord of cutting-edge longevity research, and, as the name implies, the general focus was on therapeutics that target aging, rather than basic research or theory.

Continue reading “A Report from the Longevity Therapeutics Summit” »

It’s a really important first step towards artificial general intelligence, algorithms that can do more than a single narrowly-defined task.

19 votes and so far on Reddit.

“I read more than my share of textbooks,” Gates says. “But it’s a pretty limited way to learn something. Even the best text can’t figure out which concepts you understand and which ones you need more help with.”

Software can be used to create a much more dynamic learning experience, he says.

Gates gives the example of learning algebra. “Instead of just reading a chapter on solving equations, you can look at the text online, watch a super-engaging video that shows you how it’s done, and play a game that reinforces the concepts,” he writes. “Then you solve a few problems online, and the software creates new quiz questions to zero in on the ideas you’re not quite getting.”

Continue reading “Bill Gates: Textbooks are ‘becoming obsolete’— here’s the best way to learn today” »

Circa 2018

The experimental mastery of complex quantum systems is required for future technologies like quantum computers and quantum encryption. Scientists from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences have broken new ground. They sought to use more complex quantum systems than two-dimensionally entangled qubits and thus can increase the information capacity with the same number of particles. The developed methods and technologies could in the future enable the teleportation of complex quantum systems. The results of their work, “Experimental Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger entanglement beyond qubits,” is published recently in the renowned journal Nature Photonics.

Similar to bits in conventional computers, qubits are the smallest unit of information in quantum systems. Big companies like Google and IBM are competing with research institutes around the world to produce an increasing number of entangled qubits and develop a functioning quantum computer. But a research group at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences is pursuing a new path to increase the information capacity of complex quantum systems.

Continue reading “One step closer to complex quantum teleportation” »

The transition from PCs to QCs will not merely continue the doubling of computing power, in accord with Moore’s Law. It will induce a paradigm shift, both in the power of computing (at least for certain problems) and in the conceptual frameworks we use to understand computation, intelligence, neuroscience, social interactions, and sensory perception.

Today’s PCs depend, of course, on quantum mechanics for their proper operation. But their computations do not exploit two computational resources unique to quantum theory: superposition and entanglement. To call them computational resources is already a major conceptual shift. Until recently, superposition and entanglement have been regarded primarily as mathematically well-defined by psychologically incomprehensible oddities of the quantum world—fodder for interminable and apparently unfruitful philosophical debate. But they turn out to be more than idle curiosities. They are bona fide computational resources that can solve certain problems that are intractable with classical computers. The best known example is Peter Shor’s quantum algorithm which can, in principle, break encryptions that are impenetrable to classical algorithms.

The issue is the “in principle” part. Quantum theory is well established and quantum computation, although a relatively young discipline, has an impressive array of algorithms that can in principle run circles around classical algorithms on several important problems. But what about in practice? Not yet, and not by a long shot. There are formidable materials-science problems that must be solved—such as instantiating quantum bits (qubits) and quantum gates, and avoiding an unwanted noise called decoherence—before the promise of quantum computation can be fulfilled by tangible quantum computers. Many experts bet the problems can’t adequately be solved. I think this bet is premature. We will have laptop QCs, and they will transform our world.