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Blog – Page 29

Curing Cancer In A Flash — Dr. Bill Loo, Jr., MD, PhD — Professor, Stanford Medicine / Co-Founder, TibaRay Inc

Dr. Billy W. Loo Jr., MD PhD (https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/6839) is a Professor of Radiation Oncology, a member of the Stanford Cancer Institute, the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford (MIPS), and of Bio-X Interdisciplinary Biosciences Institute. He is a physician-scientist Radiation Oncologist and Bioengineer who directs the Thoracic Radiation Oncology Program and is Principal Investigator of the FLASH Sciences Lab at Stanford (https://med.stanford.edu/loo-lab.html).

Dr. Loo’s clinical specialty is precision targeted radiotherapy for lung/thoracic cancers, including stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SABR). Dr. Loo is a recognized expert in thoracic cancers serving on multiple national committees (including as writing member or vice-chair) that publish clinical guidelines on the treatment of lung cancer and other thoracic malignancies, particularly the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN).

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British physician and microbiologist Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin nearly 100 years ago, was the first to warn of the dangers of antibiotic resistance.

In his 1945 Nobel Prize speech, 27 years after his breakthrough discovery, Fleming put the world on notice foretelling a potentially dark future for his miracle drug in the event of abuse or overuse of the medication. It was a warning that spelled trouble ahead for a vast segment of the pharmacopeia known as antimicrobial drugs.

Now, microbiologists in Hungary and China are collaborating on ways to predict drug resistance among strains of Staphylococcus aureus when exposed to antibiotics in the drug development pipeline—drugs that have yet to reach the marketplace.

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Quantum computers, which operate leveraging quantum mechanics phenomena, could eventually tackle some optimization and computational problems faster and more efficiently than their classical counterparts. Instead of bits, the fundamental units of information in classical computers, quantum computers rely on qubits (quantum bits), which can be in multiple states at once.

Silicon-based quantum dots, semiconductor-based structures that trap individual electrons, have been widely used as qubits, as the spin state of the electrons they confine can be leveraged to encode information. Despite their promise, many quantum computers developed so far are susceptible to decoherence, which entails the disruption of qubit states due to their interaction with the surrounding environment.

Researchers at the University of Rochester recently set out to experimentally realize a so-called nuclear-spin dark state, a condition that has been theorized to improve the performance of quantum computers, suppressing undesirable interactions and thus reducing decoherence. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, demonstrates the potential of this state for reducing decoherence in and thus potentially improving control over quantum information processing.

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Northwestern University researchers have identified structural features in engineered cell receptors that correlate with variations in receptor function.

Computational protein structure prediction tools were used to analyze a library of synthetic receptors, revealing that specific structural attributes such as ectodomain (ECD) distance and (TMD) interactions are associated with receptor performance.

Engineered cell therapies rely on synthetic receptors to transduce external signals into intracellular responses. The precise relationship between receptor structure and function remains poorly understood. Advances in protein structure prediction tools, such as AlphaFold and ColabFold, have enabled the modeling of complex proteins, including single-pass transmembrane receptors.

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In a leap forward for quantum computing, a Microsoft team led by UC Santa Barbara physicists on Wednesday unveiled an eight-qubit topological quantum processor, the first of its kind. The chip, built as a proof-of-concept for the scientists’ design, opens the door to the development of the long-awaited topological quantum computer.

“We’ve got a bunch of stuff that we’ve been keeping under wraps that we’re dropping all at once now,” said Microsoft Station Q Director Chetan Nayak, a professor of physics at UCSB and a Technical Fellow for Quantum Hardware at Microsoft. The chip was revealed at Station Q’s annual conference in Santa Barbara, and accompanies a paper published in the journal Nature, authored by Station Q, their Microsoft teammates and a host of collaborators that presents the research team’s measurements of these new qubits.

“We have created a new state of matter called a topological superconductor,” Nayak explained. This phase of matter hosts exotic boundaries called Majorana zero modes (MZM) that are useful for , he explained. Results of rigorous simulation and testing of their heterostructure devices are consistent with the observation of such states. “It shows that we can do it, do it fast and do it accurately,” he said.

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Joint research demonstrating the ability to readout superconducting qubits with an optical transducer was published in Nature Physics.

Quantum computing has the potential to drive transformative breakthroughs in fields such as advanced material design, artificial intelligence, and drug discovery. Of the quantum computing modalities, superconducting qubits are a leading platform towards realizing a practical quantum computer given their fast gate speeds and ability to leverage existing semiconductor industry manufacturing techniques.

However, fault-tolerant quantum computing will likely require 10,000 to a million physical qubits. The sheer amount of wiring, amplifiers and microwave components required to operate such large numbers of qubits far exceeds the capacity of modern-day dilution refrigerators, a core component of a superconducting quantum computing system, in terms of both space and passive heat load.

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Plasma arc cutting (PAC) is a thermal cutting technique widely used in manufacturing applications such as shipbuilding, aerospace, fabrication, nuclear plants decommissioning, construction industry, and the automotive industry. In this process, a jet of plasma or ionized gas is ejected at high speeds, which melts and subsequently removes unwanted parts of materials from electrically conductive workpieces such as metals.

The plasma jet is typically produced in two steps: pressuring a gas through a small nozzle hole and generating an electric arc via power supply. Remarkably, the introduced arc ionizes the gas coming out of the nozzle, which in turn generates plasma with extremely high temperatures. This enables the plasma jet to easily, quickly, and precisely slice different metals and alloys.

The quality of workpieces cut using PAC depends on various factors: kind of plasma gas and its pressure, nozzle hole shape and size, arc current and voltage, cutting speed, and distance between the torch and the workpiece. While most of these factors are well understood in the context of PAC, the impact of gas flow dynamics on cut quality remains less clearly known. This is mainly due to challenges in visualization of the flow dynamics.

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In a groundbreaking study, scientists developed new ways to control atom collisions using optical tweezers, offering insights that could advance quantum computing and molecular science. By manipulating light frequencies and atomic energy levels, they mapped out how specific atomic characteristics influence collision outcomes, paving the way for more precise quantum manipulation.

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