Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 3165

After swathes of users were unable to access parts of TweetDeck over the last few days, Twitter started rolling out a new version of the web app to users Monday. The company also added that in 30 days, users will have to be verified to access TweetDeck. This means only Twitter Blue subscribers, verified organizations, and some folks who have been gifted verification by Twitter will be able to use TweetDeck.

Twitter said that all saved searches and workflows from the old TweetDeck will be ported to the new version. It noted that users migrating to the new version will have an option to import their columns as well.

The social network is introducing full composer functionality, Spaces, video docking, and polls on TweetDeck. However, it said that Teams functionality is “temporarily unavailable.”

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Generative AI art service Midjourney has added two new features that make images “weirder” and more panoramic. Midjourney has been rapidly spitting out features over the past few weeks, with the service expected to make the jump to version 6 before the end of July. In the meantime, customers have been given a selection of creative new toys to play with in version 5.2.

New features tell the Midjourney AI to make images weirder or to pan the camera in different directions.

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Have you ever been compelled to enter sensitive payment data on the website of an unknown merchant? Would you be willing to consign your credit card data or passwords to untrustworthy hands? Scientists from the University of Vienna have now designed an unconditionally secure system for shopping in such settings, combining modern cryptographic techniques with the fundamental properties of quantum light. The demonstration of such “quantum-digital payments” in a realistic environment has been published in Nature Communications.

Digital payments have replaced physical banknotes in many aspects of our daily lives. Similar to banknotes, they should be easy to use, unique, tamper-resistant and untraceable, but additionally withstand digital attackers and data breaches.

In today’s ecosystem, customers’ sensitive data is substituted by sequences of random numbers, and the uniqueness of each is secured by a classical cryptographic method or code. However, adversaries and merchants with powerful computational resources can crack these codes and recover the customers’ private data, and for example, make payments in their name.

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Cancer spreads throughout the human body in cunning, almost militaristic, ways. For example, it can manipulate our genetic make-up, take over specific cell-to-cell signaling processes, and mutate key enzymes to promote tumor growth, resist therapies, and hasten its spread from the original site to the bloodstream or other organs.

Enzyme mutations have been of great interest to scientists who study . Scientists in the Liu and Tan labs at UNC’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center have been studying mutations of enzyme recognition motifs in substrates, which may more faithfully reflect with the potential to find new targets or directions for .

“We think understanding the roles of mutations on enzyme substrates, instead of the enzyme as a whole, may help to improve efficacy of targeted therapies, especially for enzymes that have both oncogenic and tumor suppressive function through controlling distinct subsets of substrates,” said Jianfeng Chen, Ph.D., who is first author and a postdoctoral fellow in the Liu lab in the UNC Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

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An interdisciplinary team of clinicians and scientists has published a consensus paper recommending appropriate quantitative imaging techniques for coronary artery stenosis and atherosclerosis related treatment and procedural planning. The paper has been published in Nature Reviews Cardiology.

Quantitative imaging has become increasingly important for the diagnosis of coronary artery disease (CAD) over the past five years. This is because new quantitative techniques can detect narrowed coronary arteries (coronary artery stenoses) and atherosclerosis, which play a major role in CHD patients.

It is important to correctly diagnose and accurately assess the severity of or the extent of atherosclerotic burden for the selection of appropriate measures of therapy and the related further course of the disease. However, the complexity and variety of different quantitative imaging modalities, such as computed (CT), (MRI), (ICA), intravascular ultrasound (IVUS), and (OCT), necessitated a comprehensive clinical consensus.

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The term ‘quantum computer’ gets usually tossed around in the context of hyper-advanced, state-of-the-art computing devices, but much as how a 19th century mechanical computer, a discrete computer created from individual transistors, and a human being are all computers, the important quantifier is how fast and accurate the system is at the task, whether classical or quantum computing. This is demonstrated succinctly by [Davide ‘dakk’ Gessa] with 200 lines of BASIC code on a Commodore 64 (GitHub), implementing a range of quantum gates.

Much like a transistor in classical computing, the qubit forms the core of quantum computing, and we have known for a long time that a qubit can be simulated, even on something as mundane as an 8-bit MPU. Ergo [Davide]’s simulations of various quantum gates on a C64, ranging from Pauli-X, Pauli-Y, Pauli-Z, Hadamard, CNOT and SWAP, all using a two-qubit system running on a system that first saw the light of day in the early 1980s.

Naturally, the practical use of simulating a two-qubit system on a general-purpose MPU running at a blistering ~1 MHz is quite limited, but as a teaching tool it’s incredibly accessible and a fun way to introduce people to the world of quantum computing.

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