Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 11576

Singapore, Singapore, June 03, 2016 –(PR.com)– Qatari scientists have recently discovered that an unmutated specific gene marker tends to indicate better prognosis for patients of metastatic colorectal cancer undergoing certain regiment of targeted therapies.

In a first published report of its kind on the subject, the study found that metastatic colorectal cancer patients with wild-type Kirsten Ras (KRAS) gene will likely have better survival rate upon receiving anti-epithelial growth factor receptors (EGFR) targeted therapy.

Meanwhile, the mutated-type KRAS metastatic colorectal cancer patients receiving anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) therapy tend to have poorer survival outcomes, according to authors Kakil Ibrahim Rasul, Hind Elmalik, Mini Satheesh and Prem Chandra from National Center for Cancer Care and Research (NCCCR) in Doha, Qatar.

Read more

It certainly is.

Quantum computing’s full potential may still be years away, but there are plenty of benefits to be realized right now.

So argues Vern Brownell, president and CEO of D-Wave Systems, whose namesake quantum system is already in its second generation.

Launched 17 years ago by a team with roots at Canada’s University of British Columbia, D-Wave introduced what it called “the world’s first commercially available quantum computer” back in 2010. Since then the company has doubled the number of qubits, or quantum bits, in its machines roughly every year. Today, its D-Wave 2X system boasts more than 1,000.

Continue reading “The quantum era has begun, this CEO says” | >

(Phys.org)—In order to determine how fast quantum technologies can ultimately operate, physicists have established the concept of “quantum speed limits.” Quantum speed limits impose limitations on how fast a quantum system can transition from one state to another, so that such a transition requires a minimum amount of time (typically on the order of nanoseconds). This means, for example, that a future quantum computer will not be able to perform computations faster than a certain time determined by these limits.

Although physicists have been investigating different quantum speed limits for different types of quantum systems, it has not been clear what the best way to do this is, or how many different quantum speed limits there are.

Now in a new paper published in Physical Review X, Diego Paiva Pires et al., from the UK and Brazil, have used techniques from information geometry to show that there are an infinite number of quantum speed limits. They also develop a way to determine which of these speed limits are the strictest, or in other words, which speed limits offer the tightest lower bounds. As the researchers explain, the search for the ultimate quantum speed limits is closely related to the very nature of time itself.

Read more

Nice!

Metal organic vapor phase deposition on etched 4-inch-diameter sapphire wafers is used to create low-defect-density gallium nitride templates.

Visible emitting LEDs based on gallium nitride (GaN) materials have made tremendous progress since their initial development in the early 1990s. Indeed, these LEDs are now in everyday use in many applications, e.g., for solid state lighting, and for backlighting in televisions and smartphones. LED technology, however, also has several inherent problems. These include decreasing efficiency under high injection current (droop), color change with increasing current, and poor efficiency in the green and yellow parts of the spectrum. These problems are associated with the natural polar (0001) crystal plane of wurtzite GaN, on which commercial LEDs are based, with the use of ‘c-plane’ sapphire substrates.

Read more

Riding the coattails of cold atomic physics, researchers have demonstrated the ability to steer cold molecules into desired quantum states.

Ultracold atoms have become a favorite tool in physics because they can be precisely placed in a quantum state using optical and magnetic fields. This quantum control has been crucial for understanding fundamental quantum-mechanical behavior and for creating metrological devices such as the atomic clocks that keep time for GPS systems. Current efforts are devoted to using these controllable systems to simulate, for example, superconductivity, but this and other future applications will likely require that the particles within the system interact with each other. Ultracold atoms do not interact very strongly, so an obvious alternative is to turn to molecules. As opposed to atoms, molecules can have an electric dipole, which lets them naturally interact strongly with each other through dipole forces. But molecules are not a straight substitute for atoms. They are much more complicated and thus significantly harder to cool and control than atoms.

Read more

A beautiful thought — can you imagine your auto protecting you from criminals?

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — While much of the media attention around autonomous vehicle technology has been focused on fully self-driving cars, consumers shouldn’t expect cars that act like chauffeurs any time soon.

The vast majority of mainstream vehicles adopting autonomous driving features will be controlled by advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) or “guardian angels” that learn over time, Gil Pratt, CEO Toyota Research Institute, told reporters and analysts last week.

Speaking at the New England Motor Press Association Technology Conference at MIT, Pratt said that 30,000 motor vehicle fatalities occur in the U.S. each year. That number may seem high, but as a whole, U.S. drivers are excellent at avoiding crashes.

Continue reading “A.I. guardian-angel vehicles will dominate auto industry, says Toyota exec” | >

microsoft-hololens_-720x720

“HoloLens … is not just a headset. It’s also an API – called Windows Holographic — built by Microsoft to let developers code programs from the HoloLens itself. The company’s announcement that it’s opening Windows Holographic to partners means that they, too, will be able to build devices for its API platform. Anything that’s developed using that API should work as well on partner devices as on the HoloLens itself.”

Read more

Following a controversial top-secret meeting last month, a group of scientists have announced that they’re working on synthesizing human genes from scratch. The project, currently titled HGP-Write, has the stated aim of reducing the cost of gene synthesis to “address a number of human health challenges.” As the group explains, that includes growing replacement organs, engineering cancer resistance and building new vaccinations using human cells. But in order for all of that to happen, the scientists may have to also work on developing a blueprint for what a perfect human would look like.

In some ways, the concept is just an extension of current gene editing (CRISPR) techniques that are proving their worth by saving lives. CRISPR has already been used to save the life of a one-year-old girl with a terminal case of drug-resistant leukemia. Other initiatives using the system involve curing hemophilia and HIV, although the latter has proven capable of fighting back against attempts to kill it. This new project, meanwhile, will devote time and resources to examining the ethics and economics of how far we should go with gene editing.

HGP-Write is being led by DNA pioneer George Church, a Harvard biologist who is already working on various projects to tweak humanity. In a profile, Stat revealed that the scientist published a paper in 2014 pushing “de novo synthesis,” the concept of creating perfect genes from scratch. In early 2015, he used CRISPR to implant wooly mammoth DNA into a living Asian elephant as the first step toward bringing extinct animals back from the dead. Which, when you write it down like that, makes him sound like a less plausible version of John Hammond, the fictional creator of Jurassic Park.

Read more

When you think about the headliners at a music festival, it’s unlikely that the first person to pop into your head would be Martine Rothblatt—the founder of Sirius XM, the one-time highest-paid female CEO in the world who made a robot clone of her wife, and the founder of the Terasem religion, which believes we’ll live forever by uploading our consciousness to the cloud. But Moogfest, a four-day citywide festival of music and technology in Durham, North Carolina, was not the average music festival. Unlike other festivals that make cursory overtures to technology, Moogfest dedicated as much time to explaining how technology influences creativity as to the creative output itself, even listing headline ‘technologists’ alongside its top-billed musical acts.

On the festival’s second day, Friday 20 May, Rothblatt took the stage to talk to a packed house at Durham’s Carolina Theater, in an atmosphere that felt far more like a TED talk than a music fest. Rothblatt, who is transgender, discussed the contentious North Carolina HB2 law, which bans transgender people from using public bathrooms of the gender they identify with; the idea that creativity would be better encouraged by free college tuition; and how she got to a point where she and her company, United Therapeutics, can actually think about 3D printing new body parts, and leaving our bodies behind—if we want. “You want to win more than you want to live,” she told the rapt crowd. “You yell ‘Geronimo’ as you jump crazily into monopolistic opposition.”

Quartz sat down with Rothblatt after her talk to chat more about her thoughts on AI, living forever, free education, and what happens to the soul once we’ve made digital copies of ourselves.

Read more