World Economic Forum - 3 Discoveries

There had been some good things coming out of the Ideas Lab in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland recently.. I thought this presentation by Richard Levin, an economist who spoke about some discoveries that Yale University had is definitely worth sharing..

The 1st discovery was about the breakdown of plastics. Do you know what Endophytes are? It's basically microorganisms living inside plants. There's a million species of Endophytes however only 20% are identified or isolated so far. Somehow they had discovered some of these endophytes is able to degrade plastic.. that's right breakdown polyurethane. You know all those supermarket plastic bags which we are trying to reduce usage of? ...and carry reusable Coles/Woolly's green bags? Or how plenty of these rubbish can also been seen in oceans?? ..... : (

The 2nd discovery was to do with isolating the human 'exome', being the 1% of DNA that contains this particular known gene. The 99% are junk. Once this is isolated through sequencing, somehow you can find out more about the disease itself. And following that one is able to 'personalise medicine' to enable cures for human diseases. They tested this with a Turkish 5 month old child whose siblings had similar patterns of illness however was unable to survive. However by discovering one of the nuclear types being A instead of a G (don't ask me to explain this since I'm not a biologist) somehow they figured what was wrong with the child and was able to successfully cure him. Amazing.

Discovery # 3 was to do with the future of computing, how we have doubled processing speed every 2yrs over the last 30-40 yrs, however this cannot continue forever, it's all to do with circuit elements that are being shrunk... blah blah. Anyway, quantum physics takes over, and the people at Yale have managed to base quantum principles that a single atom can be in 2 states, 0 and 1 and sometimes both states simultaneously, and build a quantum computer 2 bits, and very small in size.

How does this work? Okay with a Classic Computer standard search, let's say to find a red card, it takes 2.25 guesses on average. However with quantum computing, the search peaks simultaneously under the card at the same time, so it takes much less time in one try to find that red card.

Or find prime factors - cryptography
10 949 769 651 859 = 4 220 851 x 2 594 209

Result?
250 digit number, 1 million years on a PC
1 second on a quantum computer

Levin finalised his speech stating "who knows what these applications can lead to.. but it's exactly like laser when it first developed, who knew it was going to be used for eye surgery." And I've known a few people who have lasered their eyes to get that perfect eyesight, and it really is just the best feeling they have felt being able to regain one of their senses back to normality.