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Its cousin, lossy compression, is easier to comprehend. Lossy algorithms are used to get music into the popular MP3 format and turn a digital image into a standard JPEG file. They do this by selectively removing bits, taking what scientists know about the way we see and hear to determine which bits we'd least miss. But no one can make the case that the resulting file is a perfect replica of the original. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum computers will turbocharge the algorithm that underpins much of modern tech [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IT'S SUNDAY MORNING, and, after your socially distanced morning hike, you look at your schedule for the next few days. You need to restock your refrigerator, but the weekend crowds at the supermarket don't excite you. Monday and Tuesday are jam-packed with Zoom meetings, and you'll also be supervising your children's remote learning. In short, you aren't going to make it to the grocery store anytime soon. So you pull out your phone, fire up the Instacart app, and select your favorite grocery store. You click through your list of previously purchased items, browse specials, search for a new key-lime sparkling water a friend recommended, then select a delivery window. About 2 hours later, you watch a shopper, wearing a face mask, place bags on your porch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum Computing IS ALL THE RAGE. It seems like hardly a day goes by without some news outlet describing the extraordinary things this technology promises. Most commentators forget, or just gloss over, the fact that people have been working on quantum computing for decades—and without any practical results to show for it. t IBM notes that quantum computers could "provide breakthroughs in many disciplines, including materials and drug discovery, the optimization of complex systems, and artificial intelligence." Microsoft assures us that quantum computers will "forever alter our economic, industrial, academic, and societal landscape." And journalists repeatedly warn that quantum computers may soon break the encryption that protects the Internet. It has gotten to the point where many researchers in various fields of physics feel obliged to justify whatever work they are doing by claiming that it has some relevance to quantum computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information that hacking challenges faced by the quantum cryptography. It mentions that researchers at organizations such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have been investigating which PQC algorithms should become the new standards the world should adopt.

AN ALGORITHM that a major U.S. medical center used to identify patients who might need extra care has been shown to be racially biased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do you measure the influence of a journal or scientist? Until recently that question was largely settled. For a journal, you could turn to the impact factor (or IF), which determines the relative importance of a journal within its field by looking at how many times its articles get cited in other journals relative to the total number of articles it publishes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]