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Nice.

Synthetic RNA kit business Synthego has raised $41 million to step up its efforts to make CRISPR gene editing easier and more accurate. The West Coast startup relied heavily on tech VCs for the cash, but also gained validation from having CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna invest in its business.

Redwood City, CA-based Synthego exited stealth in August, four years after it was set up by two former SpaceX computer engineers. In those early years, which were bankrolled by an $8.3 million investment in 2013, Synthego established an automated manufacturing process for guide RNA products that it thinks sets it apart from larger competitors in terms of cost, turnaround time and editing efficiency.

Sythengo has persuaded some big names it is on to something. 8VC, an infrastructure-focused VC that also invested in uBiome, led the round with support from fellow new backers AME Cloud Ventures, Elements Capital, OS Fund, Alexandria Equities and ZhenFund. Existing investors including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Menlo Ventures also contributed to the Series B round.

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Has anyone besides NSA, NIST, DARPA, IARPA, etc. realize and thought about what type of cyber warfare will exist in a QC world? The skillsets alone will be so far advance than the techies that we have seen in most companies today as well as in most government agencies. Granted we’re simplifying things with the platform; however, skillsets will still need to be more advance than what we have seen with the standard techie.

Members of the cryptography community have expressed interest in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) recent call for an algorithm less susceptible to hacks from a computer that does not exist yet.

NIST announced a call for proposals for post-quantum cryptography standardization on Dec. 20. One or more of the proposed algorithms will ultimately replace some of NIST’s cryptographic standards that are most vulnerable to quantum computers. According to Dustin Moody, a mathematician at NIST, 40 people have joined the agency’s online cryptography forum since the call was announced two weeks ago. The forum had about 200 members before the call went out. Moody said that many people were anticipating the announcement, as cryptography enthusiasts tend to run in the same circles.

“Most people who are interested in the field already knew about it,” Moody said. “The call wasn’t a surprise.”

Continue reading “Cryptographers Rally to NIST Call for Quantum Computer Algorithms” | >

Nice advancement this week in QC.

Researchers may have finally created the first fully reprogrammable quantum computer in the world. This changes the entire spectrum of the technology, as quantum computers so far could only run one type of equation.

This marks the beginning of reprogrammable quantum computers. Several teams and companies like IBM are still in the race towards quantum computing, which so far can only run one type of equation. This seems ironic as they can theoretically run more operations than there are atoms in the universe. But this stops now.

According to Futurism, a team from the University of Maryland may have developed the first fully programmable quantum computer.

Continue reading “Researchers Build FIRST Reprogrammable Quantum Computer!” | >

We examine the effect of the stress tensor of a quantum matter field, such as the electromagnetic field, on the spectrum of primordial gravity waves expected in inflationary cosmology. We find that the net effect is a small reduction in the power spectrum, especially at higher frequencies, but which has a different form from that described by the usual spectral index. Thus this effect has a characteristic signature, and is in principle observable. The net effect is a sum of two contributions, one of which is due to quantum fluctuations of the matter field stress tensor. The other is a quantum correction to the graviton field due to coupling to the expectation value of this stress tensor. Both contributions are sensitive to initial conditions in the very early universe, so this effect has the potential to act as a probe of these initial conditions.

Read this paper on arXiv…

J. Hsiang, L. Ford, K. Ng, et. al. Thu, 5 Jan 17 31/58.

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A future in which human workers are replaced by machines is about to become a reality at an insurance firm in Japan, where more than 30 employees are being laid off and replaced with an artificial intelligence system that can calculate payouts to policyholders.

Insurance firm Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance is making 34 employees redundant and replacing them with IBM’s Watson Explorer AI.

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