Courtesy photo, Estes Valley Library

Though the Librarys building may not be open yet, theres an exciting menu of services available. Were inspired by our great local restaurants, who have been creatively bringing delicious curbside cuisine to our community. Here are 10 items now on the Library Menu:

Curbside pick-up service began this week, and its been popular! You can place holds in the Library catalog. We pull your items, and well have em ready at your scheduled pick-up time, right by the Librarys front steps.

Cliffhanger Used Books joined many downtown retailers in re-opening their doors this past week. You can again shop on-site, with all precautions in place, while supporting the Library Friends & Foundation in the process.

Digital Collections were expanding in popularity even before the closure. Weve added lots of new digital books and movies, including more than ever for kids and teens. Whatever your interest, theres a download for that!

7-Day-a-week Reference Desk: Got questions? Contact us with whats on your mind, whether its about a Library service, or locating the right website for an application, or a local service. Call, email, or look for the new online chat button at estesvalleylibrary.org.

Outdoor Wi-Fi 24/7: Library wi-fi and the Towns Wapiti wi-fi networks cover a big downtown footprint, spanning the Library parking lot all the way to Bond Park. Check out the full service area map on our website.

Live Storytimes: yesterday, Fire Chief David Wolf was our special storytime guest. You can watch storytime live three times a week, or catch all the great recordingsincluding Chief Wolf. Songs, stories, and puppets will inspire your day! How about scheduling a shared viewing time with the grandkids?

Community Zoom Rooms: while our meeting spaces are closed, weve been helping and hosting community groups and clubs to stay active and connected through videoconferencing. Many of our book clubs have been Zooming happily. Contact us, and well help you Zoom too.

College Readiness: our resident college-planning expert, Kaye Orten, offers one-on-one phone appointments to help local teens exploring college options, along with financial aid and scholarship opportunities. High school juniors can watch the Librarys all-new webinar now available through our Facebook and YouTube links.

A Helping Hand with Advanced Directives: via phone and videoconference, our partners at the Larimer Advance Care Planning Team are here to help you draft your Advanced Directivesdocumenting how you want medical decisions about you made in case you someday cant make them yourself. Work with a caring expert, and youll have peace of mind.

The Summer Reading Program is coming soon! Summer is a great time to read for pleasure, and this years Program will offer reading incentives and fun challenges for all ages. More details are coming soon, with the program launching in late May.

Find details on all these great menu items at estesvalleylibrary.org, or give us a call at 970-586-8116.

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Now serving: Ten great items on the Library menu - Estes Park Trail-Gazette

May 12, 2020 2:14 PM By: Jason G. Antonio

The City of Moose Jaw will reduce its funding to third-party groups by $159,100 this year to save money during the pandemic, with the public library seeing the biggest reduction.

During its May 11 regular meeting, city council discussed ways to reduce the 2020 tax increase in its operating budget to zero per cent from 2.3 per cent, as a way to alleviate financial pressures that residents and businesses have faced during the coronavirus pandemic. Reducing funding given to third-party groups was one area city council discussed.

Council eventually reached a zero-per-cent tax increase for 2020 by eliminating or deferring $703,636 in spending after nearly two hours of discussion.

City administration has spoken with the municipality's third-party groups that it funds and has estimated that council could reduce funding to these groups by $159,100 due to building closures and staff layoffs, a report to council explained.

These numbers indicate how much funding each group receives and how much in reductions each faces:

Council voted unanimously to reduce third-party funding by $159,100 for the remainder of the fiscal year.

Sarah Simison, library board chair, attend the meeting by video link and told council that while the library building is closed, services continue at a steady pace. Library employees have focused on programming, digital collections, and general, technical, and administrative support during the past two months.

The general, technical and administrative support occurs via a virtual help desk that staff operate remotely. The help desk answers questions, offers support and training to use the digital collection, and administers library cards. Through this latter activity, people can continue to receive help and access library resources, ask archival questions and even receive a new library card.

The library has also offered live programs for storytime, a COVID-19 conversation group, book clubs, recordings of Saturday morning craft clubs, Dungeons and Dragons activities, and youth programming using a digital platform called Discord.

The digital library collection continues to be available, (while) there has been an increase in usage of Libby or Library2Go Kanopy, Tumble Books and Hoopla, Simison said. The library proudly offers these resources and connections to the community during this time.

While this service is robust, it is not at the same level as if the building was open, she continued. The library does not need more money for operations, while it does not expect to need all of the estimated funds for 2020. However, the proposed reductions are based on the library being physically closed for four months, while service levels could not be maintained if council made similar cuts in the future.

Moose Jaw Public Library does not hold reserves for operational expenses and attempts to be good stewards of the publics money, Simison said. It attempts to provide an essential role to bring people together during this time and attempts to provide efficient and effective services and programs.

Our community will certainly face challenges going forward and we believe our library can share a role in supporting the well-being and recovery ahead, she added.

Gwen Fisher, head librarian, also participating online, added that the funding reduction is manageable this year as long as the library reopens by Aug. 31. It might be possible to have curbside pickup of books, but thats difficult to predict.

The next regular council meeting is Monday, May 25.

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Library sees biggest funding cut among all third-party groups - moosejawtoday.com

Quantum technology will revolutionise many industrial sectors, and will already begin spawning new, nationally significant business and research opportunities over the next few years. Advancements in quantum technology and, in particular, the technological leap afforded by quantum computers aka the quantum leap will enable unprecedented computing power and the ability to solve problems that are impossible for todays supercomputers.

Building this quantum computer will provide Finland with an exceptional level of capabilities in both research and technology, and will safeguard Finlands position at the forefront of new technology. The goal is to create a unique ecosystem for the development and application of quantum technology in Finland, in collaboration with companies and universities. VTT hopes to partner with progressive Finnish companies from a variety of sectors during the various phases of implementation and application.

The development and construction of Finlands quantum computer will be carried out as an innovation partnership that VTT will be opening up for international tender. The project will run for several years and its total cost is estimated at about EUR 2025 million.

The project will progress in stages. The first phase will last for about a year and aims to get a minimum five-qubit quantum computer in working order. However, the ultimate goal is a considerably more powerful machine with a larger number of qubits.

In the future, well encounter challenges that cannot be met using current methods. Quantum computing will play an important role in solving these kinds of problems. For example, the quantum computers of the future will be able to accurately model viruses and pharmaceuticals, or design new materials in a way that is impossible with traditional methods, says Antti Vasara, CEO of VTT.

Through this project, VTT is seeking to be a world leader in quantum technology and its application.

The pandemic has shocked not only Finlands economy but also the entire world economy, and it will take us some time to recover from the consequences. To safeguard economic recovery and future competitiveness, its now even more important than ever to make investments in innovation and future technologies that will create demand for Finnish companies products and services, says Vasara.

VTT has lengthy experience and top expertise in both quantum technology research and related fields of science and technology, such as superconductive circuits and cryogenics, microelectronics and photonics. In Otaniemi, VTT and Aalto University jointly run Micronova, a world-class research infrastructure that enables experimental research and development in quantum technologies. This infrastructure will be further developed to meet the requirements of quantum technologies. Micronovas cleanrooms are already equipped to manufacture components and products based on quantum technologies.

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VTT to acquire Finland's first quantum computer seeking to bolster Finland's and Europe's competitiveness - Quantaneo, the Quantum Computing Source

Businesses eager to embrace cutting-edge technology are exploring quantum computing, which depends on qubits to perform computations that would be much more difficult, or simply not feasible, on classical computers. The ultimate goals are quantum advantage, the inflection point when quantum computers begin to solve useful problems. While that is a long way off (if it can even be achieved), the potential is massive. Applications include everything from cryptography and optimization to machine learning and materials science.

As quantum computing startup IonQ has described it, quantum computing is a marathon, not a sprint. We had the pleasure of interviewing IonQ CEO Peter Chapman last month to discuss a variety of topics. Among other questions, we asked Chapman about quantum computings future impact on AI and ML.

The conversation quickly turned to Strong AI, or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which does not yet exist. Strong AI is the idea that a machine could one day understand or learn any intellectual task that a human can.

AI in the Strong AI sense, that I have more of an opinion [about], just because I have more experience in that personally, Chapman told VentureBeat. And there was a really interesting paper that just recently came out talking about how to use a quantum computer to infer the meaning of words in NLP. And I do think that those kinds of things for Strong AI look quite promising. Its actually one of the reasons I joined IonQ. Its because I think that does have some sort of application.

In a follow-up email, Chapman expanded on his thoughts. For decades, it was believed that the brains computational capacity lay in the neuron as a minimal unit, he wrote. Early efforts by many tried to find a solution using artificial neurons linked together in artificial neural networks with very limited success. This approach was fueled by the thought that the brain is an electrical computer, similar to a classical computer.

However, since then, I believe we now know the brain is not an electrical computer, but an electrochemical one, he added. Sadly, todays computers do not have the processing power to be able to simulate the chemical interactions across discrete parts of the neuron, such as the dendrites, the axon, and the synapse. And even with Moores law, they wont next year or even after a million years.

Chapman then quoted Richard Feynman, who famously said Nature isnt classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, youd better make it quantum mechanical. And by golly, its a wonderful problem because it doesnt look so easy.

Similarly, its likely Strong AI isnt classical, its quantum mechanical as well, Chapman said.

One of IonQs competitors, D-Wave, argues that quantum computing and machine learning are extremely well matched. Chapman is still on the fence.

I havent spent enough time to really understand it, he admitted. There clearly [are] a lot of people who think that ML and quantum have an overlap. Certainly, if you think of 85% of all ML produces a decision tree, and the depth of that decision tree could easily be optimized with a quantum computer. Clearly, there [are] lots of people that think that generation of the decision tree could be optimized with a quantum computer. Honestly, I dont know if thats the case or not. I think its still a little early for machine learning, but there clearly [are] so many people that are working on it. Its hard to imagine it doesnt have [an] application.

Chapman continued in a later email: ML has intimate ties to optimization: Many learning problems are formulated as minimization of some loss function on a training set of examples. Generally, Universal Quantum Computers excel at these kinds of problems.

He listed three improvements in ML that quantum computing will likely allow:

Whether Strong AI or ML, IonQ isnt particularly interested in either. The company leaves that to its customers and future partners.

Theres so much to be to be done in a quantum, Chapman said. From education at one end all the way to the quantum computer itself. I think some of our competitors have taken on lots of the entire problem set. We at IonQ are just focused on producing the worlds best quantum computer for them. We think thats a large enough task for a little company like us to handle.

So, for the moment were kind of happy to let everyone else work on different problems, he added. We just dont have extra bandwidth or resources to put into working on machine learning algorithms. And luckily, there [are] lots of other companies that think that there [are] applications there. Well partner with them in the sense that well provide the hardware that their algorithms will run on. But were not in the ML business, per se.

See more here:

IonQ CEO Peter Chapman on how quantum computing will change the future of AI - VentureBeat

May 11, 2020 David Graves, an internationally-known chemical engineer, has been named to lead a new research enterprise that will explore plasma applications in nanotechnology for everything from semiconductor manufacturing to the next generation of super-fast quantum computers.

Graves, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1986, is an expert in plasma applications in semiconductor manufacturing. He will become the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratorys (PPPL) first associate laboratory director for Low-Temperature Plasma Surface Interactions, effective June 1. He will likely begin his new position from his home in Lafayette, California, in the East Bay region of San Francisco.

He will lead a collaborative research effort to not only understand and measure how plasma is used in the manufacture of computer chips, but also to explore how plasma could be used to help fabricate powerful quantum computing devices over the next decade.

This is the apex of our thrust into becoming a multipurpose lab, said Steve Cowley, PPPL director, who recruited Graves. Working with Princeton University, and with industry and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), we are going to make a big push to do research that will help us understand how you can manufacture at the scale of a nanometer. A nanometer, one-billionth of a meter, is about ten thousand times less than the width of a human hair.

The new initiative will draw on PPPLs expertise in low temperature plasmas, diagnostics, and modeling. At the same time, it will work closely with plasma semiconductor equipment industries and will collaborate with Princeton University experts in various departments, including chemical and biological engineering, electrical engineering, materials science, and physics. In particular, collaborations with PRISM (the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials) are planned, Cowley said. I want to see us more tightly bound to the University in some areas because that way we get cross-fertilization, he said.

Graves will also have an appointment as professor in the Princeton University Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, starting July 1. He is retiring from his position at Berkeley at the end of this semester. He is currently writing a book (Plasma Biology) on plasma applications in biology and medicine. He said he changed his retirement plans to take the position at PPPL and Princeton University. This seemed like a great opportunity, Graves said. Theres a lot we can do at a national laboratory where theres bigger scale, world-class colleagues, powerful computers and other world-class facilities.

Exciting new direction for the Lab

Graves is already working with Jon Menard, PPPL deputy director for research, on the strategic plan for the new research initiative over the next five years. Its a really exciting new direction for the Lab that will build upon our unique expertise in diagnosing and simulating low-temperature plasmas, Menard said. It also brings us much closer to the university and industry, which is great for everyone.

The staff will grow over the next five years and PPPL is recruiting for an expert in nano-fabrication and quantum devices. The first planned research would use converted PPPL laboratory space fitted with equipment provided by industry. Subsequent work would use laboratory space at PRISM on Princeton Universitys campus. In the longer term, researchers in the growing group would have brand new laboratory and office space as a central part the Princeton Plasma Innovation Center (PPIC), a new building planned at PPPL.

Physicists Yevgeny Raitses, principal investigator for the Princeton Collaborative Low Temperature Plasma Research Facility (PCRF) and head of the Laboratory for Plasma Nanosynthesis, and Igor Kavanovich, co-principal investigator of PCRF, are both internationally-known experts in low temperature plasmas who have forged recent partnerships between PPPL and various industry partners. The new initiative builds on their work, Cowley said.

A priority research area

Research aimed at developing quantum information science (QIS) is a priority for the DOE. Quantum computers could be very powerful in solving complex scientific problems, including simulating quantum behavior in material or chemical systems. QIS could also have applications in quantum communication, especially in encryption, and quantum sensing. It could potentially have an impact in areas such as national security. A key question is whether plasma-based fabrication tools commonly used today will play a role in fabricating quantum devices in the future, Menard said. There are huge implications in that area, Menard said. We want to be part of that.

Graves is an expert on applying molecular dynamics simulations to low temperature plasma-surface interactions. These simulations are used to understand how plasma-generated ions, atoms and molecules interact with various surfaces. He has extensive research experience in academia and industry in plasma-related semiconductor manufacturing. That expertise will be useful for understanding how to make very fine structures and circuits at the nanometer, sub-nanometer and even atom-by-atom level, Menard said. Davids going to bring a lot of modeling and fundamental understanding to that process. That, paired with our expertise and measurement capabilities, should make us unique in the U.S. in terms of what we can do in this area.

Graves was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, and moved a lot as a child because his father was in the U.S. Air Force. He lived in Homestead, Florida; near Kansas City, Missouri; and in North Bay Ontario; and finished high school near Phoenix, Arizona.

Graves received bachelors and masters degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Arizona and went on to pursue a doctoral degree in the subject, graduating with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1986. He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics and the American Vacuum Society. He is the author or co-author of more than 280 peer-reviewed publications. During his long career at Berkeley, he has supervised 30 Ph.D. students and 26 post-doctoral students, many of whom are now in leadership positions in industry and academia.

A leader since the 1990s

Graves has been a leader in the use of plasma in the semiconductor industry since the 1990s. In 1996, he co-chaired a National Research Council (NRC) workshop and co-edited the NRCs Database Needs for Modeling and Simulation of Plasma Processing. In 2008, he performed a similar role for a DOE workshop on low-temperature plasmas applications resulting in the report Low Temperature Plasma Science Challenges for the Next Decade.

Graves is an admitted Francophile who speaks (near) fluent French and has spent long stretches of time in France as a researcher. He was named Matre de Recherche (master of research) at the cole Polytechnic in Palaiseau, France, in 2006. He was an invited researcher at the University of Perpignan in 2010 and received a chaire dexcellence from the Nanoscience Foundation in Grenoble, France, to study plasma-graphene interactions.

He has received numerous honors during his career. He was appointed the first Lam Research Distinguished Chair in Semiconductor Processing at Berkeley for 2011-2016. More recently, he received the Will Allis Prize in Ionized Gas from the American Physical Society in 2014 and the 2017 Nishizawa Award, associated with the Dry Process Symposium in Japan. In 2019, he was appointed foreign expert at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China. He served as the first senior editor of IEEE Transactions on Radiation and Plasma Medical Science.

Graves has been married for 35 years to Sue Graves, who recently retired from the City of Lafayette, where she worked in the school bus program. The couple has three adult children. Graves enjoys bicycling and yoga and the couple loves to travel. They also enjoy hiking, visiting museums, listening to jazz music, and going to the theater.

About PPPL

PPPL, on Princeton Universitys Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro, N.J., is devoted to creating new knowledge about the physics of plasmas ultra-hot, charged gases and to developing practical solutions for the creation of fusion energy. The Laboratory is managed by the University for the U.S. Department of Energys Office of Science, which is the largest single supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visitscience.energy.gov(link is external).

Source: Jeanne Jackson DeVoe, PPPL

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David Graves to Head New Research at PPPL for Plasma Applications in Industry and Quantum Information Science - HPCwire

We have all seen movies or read books about an apocalyptic world where humankind is fighting against a deadly pathogen, and researchers are in a race against time to find a cure for the same. But COVID-19 is not a fictional chapter, it is real, and scientists all over the world are frantically looking for patterns in data by employing powerful supercomputers with the hopes of finding a speedier breakthrough in vaccine discovery for the COVID-19.

A team of researchers from Penn State University has recently unearthed a solution that has the potential to expedite the process of discovering a novel coronavirus treatment that is by employing an innovative hybrid branch of research known as quantum machine learning. Quantum Machine Learning is the latest field that combines both machine learning and quantum physics. The team is led by Swaroop Ghosh, Joseph R., and Janice M. Monkowski Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering.

In cases where a computer science-driven approach is implemented to identify a cure, most methodologies leverage machine learning to focus on screening different compounds one at a time to see if they can find a bond with the virus main protease, or protein. And the quantum machine learning method could yield quicker results and is more economical than any current methods used for drug discovery.

According to Prof. Ghosh, discovering any new drug that can cure a disease is like finding a needle in a haystack. Further, it is an incredibly expensive, laborious, and time-consuming solution. Using the current conventional pipeline for discovering new drugs can take between five and ten years from the concept stage to being released to the market and could cost billions in the process.

He further adds, High-performance computing such as supercomputers and artificial intelligence canhelp accelerate this process by screeningbillions of chemical compounds quicklyto findrelevant drugcandidates.

This approach works when enough chemical compounds are available in the pipeline, but unfortunately, this is not true for COVID-19. This project will explorequantum machine learning to unlock new capabilities in drug discovery by generating complex compounds quickly, he explains.

The funding from the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, coordinated through the Penn State Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences as part of their rapid-response seed funding for research across the University to address COVID-19, is supporting this work.

Ghosh and his electrical engineering doctoral students Mahabubul Alam and Abdullah Ash Saki and computer science and engineering postgraduate students Junde Li and Ling Qiu have earlier worked on developing a toolset for solving particular types of problems known as combinatorial optimization problems, using quantum computing. Drug discovery too comes under a similar category. And hence their experience in this sector has made it possible for the researchers to explore in the search for a COVID-19 treatment while using the same toolset that they had already developed.

Ghosh considers the usage of Artificial intelligence fordrug discovery to be a very new area. The biggest challenge is finding an unknown solution to the problem by using technologies thatare still evolving that is, quantum computing and quantum machine learning.Weare excited about the prospects of quantum computing in addressinga current critical issue and contributing our bit in resolving this grave challenge. he elaborates.

Based on a report by McKinsey & Partner, the field of quantum computing technology is expected to have a global market value of US$1 trillion by 2035. This exciting scope of quantum machine learning can further boost the economic value while helping the healthcare industry in defeating the COVID-19.

Read more:

Recent Research Answers the Future of Quantum Machine Learning on COVID-19 - Analytics Insight

The BBVA Foundation awarded three MIT professors Frontiers of Knowledge Awards for their work in climate change, biology and biomedicine, and quantum computation. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Professor Kerry A. Emanuel, Department of Biology Professor David Sabatini, and Department of Mathematics Professor Peter Shor were recognized in the 12th edition of this annual award.

Kerry Emanuel

Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science, earned the BBVAs Climate Change award for his fundamental contributions to the understanding of tropical cyclones and how they are affected by climate change, according to the committees citation. By understanding the essential physics of atmospheric convection he has unraveled the behavior of tropical cyclones hurricanes and typhoons as our climate changes. He was also lauded for extraordinary effectiveness in communicating the science of climate change to the public and policymakers.

Emanuel is the co-founder (with Daniel H. Rothman) and co-director of the MIT Lorenz Center, a climate think tank that fosters creative approaches to learning how climate works. He was the first to link greater hurricane intensity to climate change-induced warming of sea surface waters.

It is hard to imagine an area of climate science where one persons leadership is so incontestable, says Bjorn Stevens, BBVA Foundation committee chairman and director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology.

Hurricanes have long been known as destructive natural events, but the underlying physics of them was still largely unknown. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, after completing degrees at MIT and later joining the EAPS faculty, Emanuel pinned down the mechanisms behind hurricanes. In his research detailing how warming surface oceans fuel storms and increase the intensity, he called them massive, natural machines that convert the heat they extract from the ocean into wind energy.

A changing climate will see more powerful hurricanes. Emanuel warns that this will complicate the already-tough task of making accurate forecasts, and predicts that hurricanes will spread into more regions of the planet.

His models currently predict a 5 percent increase in hurricane intensity (i.e., wind speed) for each 1-degree rise in ocean temperatures. Three degrees of warming would makehurricanes 15 percent more intense, but their destructive potential would actually triple; in other words, with this15percent increasein wind speed, thedamage would increase by around 45 percent, says Emanuel, the author of "Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes" (Oxford Unviersity Press, 2005) and "What We Know about Climate Change" (MIT Press, 2018).

Todays most intense hurricanes may have a wind speed at the surface of 85 meters per second, but by the end of this century, unless we curb greenhouse gas emissions, we could start to see speeds of up to 90-92 meters per second. A hurricanes destructive potential is determined by its wind speed, so in fact, the destructiveness of these storms for human populations would be considerably greater.

Emanuel says that the international community is not doing nearly enough to combat climate change. We need to stop listening to the voices of denial, and instead listen to our own children, who are crying out for us to act.

David Sabatini

Sabatini, an MIT professor of biology and member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, shares his Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biology and Biomedicine with Michael Hall of the University of Basel, for the discovery of a protein kinase that regulates cellular metabolism and growth.

Their discovery of mTOR is used in the study of a wide array of health conditions, including obesity, aging, cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, Alzheimers, and Parkinsons. Research has suggested that 60 percent of cancers have some mechanism for turning on the mTOR pathway, Sabatini says. I could never have imagined the implications of that first discovery.

Sabatini began his PhD thesis on understanding the mechanism of action of rapamycin, a natural anti-fungal agent proved to have immunosuppressive and anti-cancer properties. It is used to prevent organ rejection in transplant patients.

The two scientists arrived at their findings independently. Hall discovered the target of rapamycin (TOR) protein in yeast cells in 1993 during his time as a senior investigator; Sabatini isolated it in mammals while still a doctoral student, in 1994, and gave it the name mTOR.

In mammalian cells, mTOR which stands for mechanistic target of rapamycin, an immunosuppressant drug that inhibits cell growth is the keystone molecule in a pathway that regulates cellular metabolic processes in response to nutrients.

Sabatini explains that mTOR is a switch that turns on in the presence of nutrients, so the body can build material, and when there are no nutrients available it breaks the material down. The on/off switch of the mTOR switch controls a cascade of hundreds of molecular signals, many of which are still unknown to science.

The molecular mechanisms that regulate the growth of organisms and coordinate it with the availability of nutrients were unknown until two decades ago, said the committee.

After the molecule was isolated in yeast and mammals, both researchers began the task of unraveling its multiple organismal functions. Sabatinis lab has since identified most of the components of the mTOR pathway and shown how they contribute to the function of cells and organisms. His discoveries have opened avenues for identifying disease vulnerabilities and treatment targets for diverse conditions notably including key metabolic vulnerabilities in pancreatic and ovarian cancer cells and neurodevelopmental defects. He is currently working to exploit those vulnerabilities as targets for new therapies.

Rapamycin is used as an immunosuppressant to prevent rejection of transplanted organs and as an anti-cancer agent. In the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, it is used as a coating for coronary stents to stop new blockages forming in the bloodstream.

Because mTOR is a nutrient sensor, additional research points to caloric restriction for increasing longevity. TOR was the first known protein that influences longevity in all of the four species that scientists commonly use to study aging: yeast, worms, flies, and mice. We are just scratching the surface of possible mTOR applications, he says. I dont know if it will help us live to be 120, but I think it will have beneficial effects on different physiological systems, and I am practically sure that it will ameliorate aspects of aging-related diseases.

Peter Shor

Shor, the Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics, was recognized in the Basic Sciences category for his role in the development of quantum computation and cryptology. He shares this award with IBM Researchs chemical physicist Charles H. Bennett and University of Montreal computer scientist Gilles Brassard.

The award committeeremarked on the leap forward in quantum technologies, an advance that draws heavily on the new laureates pioneering contributions. The committee stated that their work spans multiple disciplines and brings together concepts from mathematics, physics, and computer science. Their ideas are playing a key role in the development of quantum technologies for communication and computation.

Bennett and Brassard invented quantum cryptography in the 1980s to ensure the physical inviolability of data communications. The importance of this work became apparent 10 years later when Shor discovered that a hypothetical quantum computer would render effectively useless the conventional cryptography systems underpinning the privacy and security of todays internet communications.

Bennett and Brassards BB84 protocol generally acknowledged as the first practical application of the science of quantum information underpins the security of all our internet communications and transactions, and is based on the existence of mathematical problems that computers cannot solve. Until, as the citation states, Shor discovered that quantum computers could factorize integers much faster than any supercomputer, therefore compromising the security of conventional cryptographic schemes.

Says Brassard, The importance of our work became much more evident after Shor destroyed everything else. Shors Algorithm is now one of the quantum algorithms that comprise the fast-developing language to be spoken by tomorrows quantum computers.

Another of Shors contributions is an algorithm used to correct quantum computer errors, an essential requirement for enabling and scaling quantum computations, the committee wrote.

Quantum computers are exposed to a large volume of noise, causing numerous errors. Everyone thought that you couldnt correct errors on quantum computers, recalls Shor, because as soon as you try to measure a quantum system you disturb it. In other words, if you try to measure the error so as to correct it, you disturb it and computation is interrupted. My algorithm showed that you can isolate and fix the error and still preserve the computation.

Quantum cryptography is one of the most advanced branches of quantum technology, which the laureates view as a long-term prospect. It will be five or 10 years before a quantum computer can do anything approaching useful, says Shor. With time, however, he is convinced that these machines will deliver revolutionary applications. For example, in biomedicine, it takes enormous amounts of computer time to simulate the behavior of molecules, he says. But quantum computers could achieve that, and help design new drugs.

The BBVA Foundation promotes knowledge based on research and artistic and cultural creation, and supports activity on the analysis of emerging issues in five strategic areas: environment, biomedicine and health, economy and society, basic sciences and technology, and culture. The Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, spanning eight prize categories, recognize research and creative work of excellence as embedded in theoretical advances, technological developments, or innovative artistic works and styles, as well as fundamental contributions in addressing key challenges of the 21st century.

Since its launch in 2009, the BBVA also has given awards to MITs Susan Solomon for climate change; Marvin Minsky, Adi Shamir,Silvio Micali,Shafi Goldwasser, and Ronald Rivest for information and computer technologies; Stephen Buchwald for basic sciences; Edward Boyden for biology and biomedicine; and Daron Acemoglu for economics.

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Kerry Emanuel, David Sabatini, and Peter Shor receive BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge awards - MIT News

Sonoya Mizuno as Lily in FXs Devs. (Photo by Miya Mizuno / FX)

The premise of the miniseries Devs is straightforward: Amaya, a company that specializes in quantum computing, invents a top secret prediction algorithm, kills an employee in an effort to protect that invention, and makes an enemy of the victims lover and coworker. The first episode features a gilded computer fortress, espionage, a murder, and a staged suicide, pulpy elements suggesting popcorn thrills and cyberpunk frenzy. The reality is much stranger: Devs is really about deities and the theologies we embrace to appease them.

Devs is writer and director Alex Garlands second tale of Silicon Valley delusions. His directorial debut, 2014s Ex Machina, explored the development of a gendered AI being, Ava, whose sentience is tested by her creator, Nathan, and Caleb, his unwitting employee, who believes he has won a special contest. The film takes place far outside Silicon Valley, at a remote compound owned by Nathan, who is the CEO of a search engine company, but its defined by the tech industrys promethean ambitions. As Nathan and Caleb speak casually of creating and assessing life, they come across as intelligent but self-important, a dynamic that Ava uses to plot her escape.

Devs takes place in the Valley itself. It opens with a foreboding profile of Amaya CEO Forest (Nick Offerman), whos introduced alone in darkness, followed by a montage of San Franciscos glittering landmarks and jarring snapshots of the citys horrific income disparity. Those poles merge when Amaya employees Lily (Sonoya Mizuno) and Sergeis (Karl Glusman) commute to work: Before the couple can exit their apartment building, they must step past a homeless man who sleeps on their stoop.

But then, as the Amaya-branded charter bus that transports them glides out of the city and into the surrounding redwoods, Garlands portrayal of the Valley shifts again, from the sociological to the occult. Ensconced in the verdant Bay Area hills like the lair of a Bond villain, the Amaya campus is scenic and glamorousexcept for a gargantuan bust of a little girl that towers over the buildings and trees, her hands raised as if shes praying or dancing. The strangeness intensifies when Sergei is promoted to work in Devs, the software development arm of Amaya that focuses on the companys clandestine predictive algorithm (also named Devs). The team is housed in a facility located in a clearing thats deeper in the woods than the main campus. The path through the trees is lined with glowing lights that form halos around the redwood trunks, and the entrance is lined with iridescent obelisks that sparkle in the California sun. As Sergei enters this sanctum and rides a levitating platform to his workstation, Amaya acquires an increasingly magical hue. This is the heart of Devs: science, the surreal, and the thin line between them.

The show is Garlands first foray into television, but its continuous with his previous work as a screenwriter and director. Its closest analog in his filmography, which spans works like the zombie film 28 Days Later (2002) and the dystopian police thriller Dredd (2012), is 2018s Annihilation. Like that hallucinogenic adaptation of Jeff VanderMeers sci-fi book, Devs starts with the familiar and moves deep into the uncanny. The show is variously a drama, a thriller, and horror, constantly molting its skin. Garland seems to favor genre because he can set up traditional narrative structures and fill them with trapdoorsbeckoning viewers in, then flipping a switch.

The first misdirection is the main character. Though Sergei is the focus of the initial episode, hes killed by its end, and the circumstances of his death prompt Lily to question Amayas quaint veneer. A member of the companys encryption department, Lily is questioning and cunning. She speaks and moves slowly, dwelling on her words and constantly frowning. When Amaya covers up Sergeis death as a self-immolation and even furnishes a convincing video of the suicide, Lily is suspicious, a skepticism that structures the show. For every obstacle Amaya throws in her path, she responds with a unique solution, inciting a game of cat and mouse that involves cons, hacking, and escape from a mental ward.

Shes well-suited to a story critical of the tech industry: brainy yet ordinary, crafty but fallible, frightened but not paranoid. Compared to brooding sci-fi heroes like Elliot Alderson of Mr. Robot, who is a savant hacker and exclusively wears black hoodies, or John Anderton of Minority Report, who is a master detective and escape artist, Lily isnt a virtuoso. Her defining trait is her detachment from the myths and illusions of Silicon Valley, a disposition that grounds her decisions as shes drawn deeper into Amayas designs. Through Lily, the show highlights the lives beyond the technocracy, even at the epicenter of its innovations.

Devs follows a decade filled with critical looks at the tech industry. From the roasting of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network to Anna Wieners memoir Uncanny Valley to Boots Rileys fuming send-up of Silicon Valley callousness in Sorry to Bother You, tech culture has become a standard milieu for parsing modern anxieties about corporate power, personal privacy, and social inequality. Devs channels these tensions, but tweaks their vernacular. While the show can be watched as a David and Goliath tale, in which an aggrieved woman goes to war with an egomaniacal man and the ruthless capitalist machine at his disposal, Garland is largely disinterested in allegory. For him, politics and philosophy are embedded in science and technology itself. Accordingly, the conflicts of the series flow from the quantum mechanics at the heart of the story.

In particular, Garland traces the consequences of a religious embrace of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In that version of quantum theory, all possible iterations of an event can and do happen, and our experience of an event is just one branch on an infinitely expanding tree. This interpretation posits that all events are reducible to their underlying physicsmeaning they are deterministicand Forest and his chief programmer, Katie (Alison Pill), test that theory by using the Devs algorithm to recreate and then observe the past with pristine clarity, eventually peering into the future as well.

The self-fulfilling nature of viewing choice as an illusion, and then later confirming it, imbues Forest and Katie with an inhuman dispassion. Forest, aloof and disinterested, powerful yet not paranoid, is a far cry from the standard tech overlord. He lives in a modest house without a fence or gates and wears dinky plaid shirts and jeans, scanning as down-to-earth. Katie, who is introduced at his side, has zero tolerance for error and ineptitude, yet shes intensely serene. She channels Silicon Valley intelligence without the performative machismo or affected awkwardness; she wants to be right, not worshipped. Together the pair practice a cold form of nonintervention, declining to interfere as the events of the series beget car accidents, kidnappings, and torture. Fate (on the quantum level) is their religion and their piety is steadfast. For a higher cause, they relinquish their free will. Garland plays with narrative forms through Lilys pluck and suspicion, giving the series a peculiar, contradictory rhythm. In one scene, Lily and Jamie (Lin Ha), a heartbroken and downcast ex-boyfriend shes enlisted to help her investigate Sergeis death, are arranged around their old apartment at different points in time. They sit apart, enter and exit separately, and brood. Simultaneously, Lily and Sergei are positioned around the same space: They hug, kiss, and cuddle. Jamie insists he was smitten with Lily and blindsided by their breakup, but in this moment we see the distance between them.

In another scene with the same visual conceit, Katie views different versions of the car accident that killed Forests wife and daughter, who the company is named after. The collisions play out simultaneously, showing multiple versions of Forest running to the scene of the accident as the cars swerve or impact in different ways, like some video game glitch. Only one scenario is fatal, however, highlighting how perfectly the accident played out. These time collages are a preview of the Devs system that gets honed later in the series, and they convey Garlands unique relationship to science. As uncanny as it is to view the past in high-definition and as scary as it is for Amaya to possess such technology, its also impressive. Garland isnt an apologist for Amayas abuses, but he doesnt downplay the wonder of the companys achievements.

That cautious reverence pays off in the form of the predictive algorithm system actually working. After starts and stops, toward the end of the series it becomes fully functional, granting Amaya the ability to view history exactly as it happened by applying determinism to GPS coordinates and setting the clock. The result is the ultimate archive of earths history and an unparalleled spying device. Housed in a cozy, theater-like room inside of the Devs HQ, the device works like an immersive scrying mirror, conveying the spookiness at the heart of cutting-edge science. What if were magicians? Forest asks Katie, his voice quaking with fear.

This outcome is striking because a longstanding trope in sci-fi is that devices or processes with flawed inventors are themselves flawed. This is the premise of most fictional forms of artificial intelligence, from Sonny in I, Robot to The Avengers Ultron. (And it is nearly always the premise of stories involving genetic engineering, as seen in Jurassic Park, Frankenstein, and The Fly.) In a sly nod to tech leaders often coming from sales or venture capital backgrounds,, Forest plays no role in the Devs system getting up and running (Hes not a genius, hes an entrepreneur, one character quips). More than a joke, this choice allows the narrative to pivot away from his neurosis as a grieving father and husband and consider the broader implications of Devs. As Devs programmers celebrate the tool and test it, an anxiety sets in. They have become gods and the power is horrifying. Determinism robs them of liberty and humanity.

In a masterstroke of plotting and irony, that breakthrough leads back to Lily, the rogue nonbeliever. When Katie and Forest use the algorithm to view the future, they find that they cannot see past a moment when Lily strolls into Devs, beginning a countdown to learn the fate of the company and the device itself. When that encounter inevitably happens, whats dazzling is that Lily does not arrive as an avenging angel. Rather, she acts as a sort of quantum trickster, at once foiling Amayas schemes and enabling them, challenging the companys mad science and proving it.

A key moment in the finale is Forest informing Lily that the v in Devs is roman, making Devs Deus, or deity in Latin. Forest introduces this trivia as an inside joke, accenting how removed he is from the consequences of his ambitions. In his pursuit to reconnect with his daughter and wife at any cost, he turns the world into his instrument. In his view, everything Lily has endured is collateral damage. For Lily, the disclosure validates her resistance. If a deity is as constraining and controlling as Forest, it must be defied.

Corresponding to its themes, the series ends ambiguously. Theres no divine punishment for Katie and Forests tinkering, no reward for Lilys courage. The Devs system does not explode or short-circuit or get unplugged. The government does not storm in with guns and hackers to save the day. Instead, the show concludes with Lily and Forest becoming quantum data, allowing them to repeatedly live out multiple versions of their lives. In the timeline we see, which is one among infinite possibilities, Forest is reunited with his daughter and wife and Lily reconciles with Jamie. Its tragic and touching and fleetinga very quantum ending.

This sort of finale elides the aftermath of a world containing a godlike algorithm and settles instead on something more conventional: twin portraits of grief. But the value of the more narrow conclusion is it posits that, like consumers, techs engineers and their loved ones are also exploited by the relentless drive for innovation. In Ex Machina, Garland packed this sentiment into an allusion to the quote Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds, the line from the Bhagavad Gita that Robert Oppenheimer uttered after witnessing the detonation of a nuclear weapon. In Devs, the technology and the destruction are different, but in the shows panorama of losses personal, global, and ontological, worlds feels pointedly more plural.

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Between God and Science in the Surreal Silicon Valley of Devs - The Nation

Madhya Pradesh on Friday recorded 89 new coronavirus (COVID-19) cases, taking the State-wide tally to 3,341, the Directorate of Health Services said. The death toll in the State from the pandemic rose to 200, as seven more fatalities were reported including three from the worst-affected city of Indore.

State-wise tracker for COVID-19 cases, deaths and testing, and a map of confirmed cases in India

With 1,727 cases and 86 deaths, Indore continues to remain in focus. Alarmingly, the count of critical patients in the city surged threefold overnight earlier this week from 52 on May 4 to 195 on May 5 and was at 197 on Friday. As many as 663 patients, however, have recovered from the illness in the city so far.

Bhopal, by comparison, has so far reported 679 cases and 24 deaths, with 354 patients, or more than half of those infected, having recovered.

Among the fatalities reported on Friday, two were in Bhopal and one each in Ujjain and Jabalpur, according to a bulletin issued by the Directorate.

In Ujjain, 43 patients, or 20% of all those infected, have succumbed to the respiratory illness. The number of cases in the city stand at 220, and recoveries at 57.

In order to relieve the burden on a private medical college in the city, Ujjains only COVID-19 facility, the State government has reserved 100 beds at the Sri Aurobindo Institute of Medical Sciences (SAIMS), which is the largest COVID-19 hospital in neighbouring Indore district.

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Originally posted here:
Coronavirus | Indore remains worst hit in Madhya Pradesh with 3 more deaths - The Hindu

Indore, May 7 () Amid the ongoing debate in themedical fraternity about the efficacy of the plasma therapy onCOVID-19 patients, a private hospital in Indore has claimedthat four such persons recovered from the infection afterundergoing this therapy.

A district health official confirmed that plasmatherapy was used on some coronavirus positive persons at theprivately-run Sri Aurobindo Institute of Medical Sciences(SAIMS), and said that as per the doctors at that hospital ithelped these patients in their recovery.

Talking to on Thursday, head of the Chest DiseaseDepartment at SAIMS, Dr Ravi Dosi, said that one of these fourpatients is a 26-year-old woman.

Consent was obtained from all four patients prior tothe clinical trial of plasma therapy, he added.

Indore district's Chief Medical and Health Officer(CMHO), Praveen Jadia, said, "At SAIMS, the use of plasmatherapy was done on some COVID-19 patients and according tothe doctors there, it helped them in the recovery."

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"We hope that it would help the patients in theirrecovery," Jadia added.

Convalescent plasma therapy involves injectingpatients with plasma from people who have recovered fromCOVID-19 infection. The theory is that the plasma will havethe antibodies required to boost a sick person's immunityresponse to the coronavirus.

In addition, reports of the CT scan of their lungsalso confirmed that they have been free of coronavirusinfection, he added.

Dr Dosi, however, said, "We are not yet announcing anyresults regarding the effect of plasma therapy on COVID-19patients. We want to try this clinical trial on a few morepatients. We will share the results of clinical trial with theICMR."

The experts said that the antibodies develop in theblood of the people fully recovered from COVID-19, which helpthem to fight the disease in the future.

Indore is among the worst-hit districts by COVID-19 inthe country.

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4 COVID-19 patients 'recover' after plasma therapy in Indore - Business Insider India