Lifeboat Foundation

Seeqc, a startup that is part of a relatively new class of quantum computing companies that is looking at how to best use classical computing to manage quantum processors, today announced that it has raised $5 million from M Ventures, the strategic corporate venture capital arm of Merck, the German pharmaceutical giant. Merck will be a strategic partner for Seeqc and will help it to develop its R&D efforts to develop useful application-specific quantum computers.

With this, New York state-based Seeqc has now raised a total of $11 million, including a recent $6.8 million seed round that included BlueYard Capital, Cambium, NewLab and the Partnership Fund for New York City.

Since developing new pharmaceuticals is an obvious use case for quantum computing, it makes sense that large pharmaceutical companies are trying to get ahead of their competitors by making strategic investments in companies like Seeqc.

Advanced stages of dementia typically follow a series of muted symptoms patients might mistake for less serious conditions, like stress or sleep deprivation. In fact, according to a new study conducted by researchers from Duke University, many of us evidence one of the premiere red flags associated with the illness almost every day.

“There has been a misperception that financial difficulty may occur only in the late stages of dementia, but this can happen early, and the changes can be subtle,” explained senior author P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, a professor of psychiatry and geriatrics at Duke University, in a media release.

The new paper, published in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease, examines the cross-sectional relationship between dementia and financial management skills in the elderly. The strength of the report’s findings highlights how limited the diagnostic scope has been up until very recently.

Large banks are industry leaders adopting AI to stay ahead of competition, provide greater customer service to customers, more relevant services and offerings, as well as helping transform many back end processes. How is USAA adopting AI to help?

The Royal Society is to create a network of disease modelling groups amid academic concern about the nation’s reliance on a single group of epidemiologists at Imperial College London whose predictions have dominated government policy, including the current lockdown.

It is to bring in modelling experts from fields as diverse as banking, astrophysics and the Met Office to build new mathematical representations of how the coronavirus epidemic is likely to spread across the UK — and how the lockdown can be ended.

The first public signs of academic tensions over Imperial’s domination of the debate came when Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, published a paper suggesting that some of Imperial’s key assumptions could be wrong.

Are we in for the Big Short II? The cyclical nature of markets spells an eventual collapse of the real estate prices in the U.S. following the next global stock market meltdown and global recession which will be drastically different the next time around. For one, the coming collapse is about to start a secular declining trend in property values. Secondly, after the collapse, the prices of properties won’t be able to recover like they did after the previous “property market corrections.”

Why? I hope we all may agree that oil, for example, will never recover to all-time highs. Similar premises hold true for the existing home values. There are multiple major socio-economic structural changes on the horizon contributing to this permanent decline which is in the cards right now. Also, many conventional linear projections won’t even apply anymore.

THE NEXT “CYCLICAL” GLOBAL RECESSION — the world’s stock markets are the best indication of things to come in the economic milieu. The next financially engineered global recession may be the last effort by the capital-controlling elite of Wall Street to keep political and economic control over the global population and maintain the faltering capitalist system as long as possible;

Quantum computers will revolutionize information technology, ushering in an era where certain types of calculations will be performed with almost unimaginable speed. Practical applications will include healthcare disciplines such as molecular biology and drug discovery; big data mining; financial services such as portfolio analysis and fraud detection; and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The federal government is helping to create an environment in which quantum computing innovation and experimentation can flourish. The National Quantum Initiative Act puts $1.2 billion into the quantum research budgets of the Energy Department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NASA and the National Science Foundation. The law also outlines a 10-year plan to accelerate the development of quantum information science and technology applications.

Meanwhile, The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy is working to ensure that economic growth opportunities and opportunities for improving the world are baked into quantum policies and systems.

Computing giant IBM and the National University of Singapore (NUS) have embarked on a three-year collaboration to find ways to use quantum computing to solve real-world problems and train quantum scientists.

Quantum computers are currently used in many areas, including medical research into new drug development and the enhancement of cyber security in the financial sector.

The collaboration between IBM and NUS, announced yesterday, is the first of its kind in South-east Asia and gives NUS researchers access to 15 of IBM’s powerful quantum computing systems via a cloud service.

The 19 3D-printable parts that make up the mask are visible on the Maker Mask website along with details on materials needed, download instructions, videos, the ability to donate to the cause and more. The cost of each finished mask, printed in about three hours, is estimated to be between $2 and $3.

A technology veteran and a 3D-printing “savant” have teamed with other members of industry, health care and government to launch Maker Mask, a Seattle nonprofit creating medically endorsed, reusable protective masks using everyday 3D printers.

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Astronomers may have one less (satellite) constellation to worry about.

Late Friday, OneWeb announced it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in a New York court. In a statement, the company said it had been in “advanced negotiations” since the beginning of the year to raise a new round of funding needed to complete its broadband satellite constellation. The company said it was close to completing that deal, but “the financial impact and market turbulence related to the spread of COVID-19” kept it from closing the deal.

OneWeb had just started large-scale deployment of its constellation, with Soyuz launches in early February and again March 21 each placing 34 satellites into orbit. Future launches are now on hold—launch services provider Arianespace was the largest single unsecured creditor identified in OneWeb’s bankruptcy, at $238 million—and may never resume, depending on who buys the company’s assets in a planned sale and their intentions for them.