Lifeboat Foundation

Nathan Treff was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at 24. It’s a disease that runs in families, but it has complex causes. More than one gene is involved. And the environment plays a role too.

So you don’t know who will get it. Treff’s grandfather had it, and lost a leg. But Treff’s three young kids are fine, so far. He’s crossing his fingers they won’t develop it later.

Now Treff, an in vitro fertilization specialist, is working on a radical way to change the odds. Using a combination of computer models and DNA tests, the startup company he’s working with, Genomic Prediction, thinks it has a way of predicting which IVF embryos in a laboratory dish would be most likely to develop type 1 diabetes or other complex diseases. Armed with such statistical scorecards, doctors and parents could huddle and choose to avoid embryos with failing grades.

Continue reading “Eugenics 2.0: We’re at the Dawn of Choosing Embryos” »

Researchers at Columbia University have successfully created the world’s first computer chip powered by an isolated chemical biological process. Natural systems emit enormous amounts of energy that is often underutilized. This new bio-chip represents a high-tech version of “working with nature” and is producing promising results in the laboratory.

IBM has been offering quantum computing as a cloud service since last year when it came out with a 5 qubit version of the advanced computers. Today, the company announced that it’s releasing 20-qubit quantum computers, quite a leap in just 18 months. A qubit is a single unit of quantum information.

The company also announced that IBM researchers had successfully built a 50 qubit prototype, which is the next milestone for quantum computing, but it’s unclear when we will see this commercially available.

While the earliest versions of IBM’s quantum computers were offered for free to build a community of users, and help educate people on programming and using these machines, today’s announcement is the first commercial offering. It will be available by the end of the year.

Continue reading “IBM makes 20 qubit quantum computing machine available as a cloud service” »

Who says Silicon Valley doesn’t fund real technology any more?

A startup called Quantum Circuits plans to compete with the likes of IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Intel to bring quantum computing out of the lab and into the wider world. There’s one good reason to think it might be able to beat them all.

That’s because Quantum Circuits was founded by Robert Schoelkopf, a professor at Yale, whose work in many ways has helped kick-start this exciting new era of quantum advances.

Quantum computers exploit two strange features of quantum physics, entanglement and superposition, to process information in a fundamentally different way from traditional computers. The approach allows the power of such machines to scale dramatically with even just a few quantum bits, or qubits. Those racing to build practical quantum computers are nearing the point where quantum machines will be capable of doing things that no conventional machine could—an inflection point known as quantum supremacy.

Continue reading “Why This New Quantum Computing Startup Has a Real Shot at Beating Its Competition” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ySsv5-jSqss

A startup with a $100 million investment wants to implant chips into human brains to enhance their abilities.

A team of scientists at the University of California San Diego led by biologist Nan Hao have combined engineering, computer science, and biology technologies to decode the molecular processes in cells that influence aging.

Continue reading “Scientists decipher mechanisms in cells for extending human longevity” »

IBM has announced a milestone in its race against Google and other big tech firms to build a powerful quantum computer.

Dario Gil, who leads IBM’s quantum computing and artificial intelligence research division, said Friday that the company’s scientists have successfully built and measured a processor prototype with 50 quantum bits, known as qubits.

Gil says it’s the first time any company has built a quantum computer at this scale.

Researchers have built the most sophisticated quantum computer yet, signaling progress toward a powerful new way of processing information.