GAVNet Collaborative Curation

Experimental data and predictive algorithms combine to reveal the essential biomolecule's shape-shifting.

It's always fun to indulge your inner conspiracy theorist. We like watching UFO documentaries and spending nights in haunted houses. The X-Files was a blockbuster show for a reason. We all want to believe.

The IBM Quantum team envisions a future where quantum computers interact frictionlessly with high performance computing resources, taking over for the specific problems where quantum can offer a computational advantage. Pushing the envelope of classical computing is crucial to this goal, especially as we develop new quantum algorithms and try to understand which problems are worth tackling with a quantum computer.

The common challenge of covid-19 has produced very different outcomes around the world, leading to many questions about the determinants of national performance and shortcomings in global performance. Problems of reporting and standards do not make precise comparisons easy, but few would disagree that the roughly 1400 deaths reported by South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam together represent far better results than the roughly 700 000 deaths reported by Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States.1 Adjusting these figures for population-the first group has about a third of the citizens of the second group-does not explain why covid-19 mortality differs by a factor of nearly 500. Neither typical proxy measures such as gross national income per capita nor national rankings on the 2019 Global Health Security Index have any meaningful association with performance on covid-19.2

One of the most striking developments during the early months of the pandemic was the way state competition quickly took over. Always heralded as a textbook case of the need for global cooperation, pandemics turned out to be prime examples of global competition, albeit in an indirect and gamified version.

This paper examines an optimal design for guaranteed income in the real-world national context, considering how a new cash transfer policy can be designed, and how it could best pair with or replace existing social safety net programs.

High levels of gambling are associated with a 37% increase in mortality, according to a new study, which reveals that the top 1% of gamblers surveyed spent 58% of their income and one in ten are spending 8% on the habit. Published today [4 Feb] in Nature Human Behavior, the study led by Dr. Naomi Muggleton, of Oxford's Department of Social Policy and Intervention, highlights the financial damage, negative lifestyles and health of gamblers, who can move from 'social' to high-level gambling in months.

A large team of researchers working with Google Inc. and affiliated with a host of institutions in the U.S., one in Germany and one in the Netherlands has implemented a quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) on a 53-qubit noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) device. In their paper published in the journal Nature Physics,, the group describes their method of studying the performance of their QAOA on Google's Sycamore superconducting 53-qubit quantum processor and what they learned from it. Boaz Barak with Harvard University has published a News & Views piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue.