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<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Roominate" title_caption="Alice Brooks and Bettina Chen, cofounders of Roominate." class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/55ae6f246da811f07b8f1f13-960/alice-brooks-and-bettina-chen.jpg"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span>Roominate</span></p><p class="caption">Alice Brooks and Bettina Chen, cofounders of Roominate.</p></div><p></p></div></div>As graduate students in engineering at Stanford, Alice Brooks and Bettina Chen recognized each other as kindred spirits. They were both engineers. They were both coming fresh out of two of the country's most intense undergrad programs - Brooks from MIT, and Chen from Caltech - and they were both women.</p><p>Even coming from engineering schools, they didn't expect that to be as rare as it was. "We thought Stanford was a more balanced place," Chen tells Business Insider. It wasn't, but they hope it soon will be - thanks in part to <a href="http://www.roominatetoy.com/">Roominate</a>, the toy company the cofounded. The idea: wired building kits, designed to get girls into tech. </p><p>"F<span class="s1">or both of us, we found that it was really toys we played with when we were younger that really got us building and tinkering and making things with our hands - things that really drew us toward engineering in college," Chen explains. </span></p><p><span class="s1">But if toys got them into college, it's college - indirectly - that got them back into toys. </span></p><p><span class="s1">"One of the things we both became accustomed to while studying at MIT, Caltech, and Stanford was high pressure situations," Chen says. "Caltech was really tough for me, and I failed my fair share of tests." </span></p><p><span class="s1">She recalls a nightmare three hours spent staring blankly at a freshman physics quiz. "It was a rough experience, just sitting there, having zero idea how to approach some of these problems." And she didn't - she failed the quiz. </span></p><p>That was the first business lesson she learned: Just because something doesn't work out doesn't mean it's not worth trying."I learned I couldn't expect to succeed at everything I tried my hand at," Chen says. </p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_left click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Roominate" title_caption="Future engineers?" class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/55ae6faaecad04da49144031-960/roominate-kids.jpg"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span>Roominate</span></p><p class="caption">Future engineers?</p></div><p></p></div></div>Across the country, Brooks was going through the same evolution at MIT. "I thought I had to figure everything out myself," she explains. Quickly, though, she learned that wasn't going to work. "In asking for help, my primary goal became understanding the material, not getting a perfect score," she says. </p><p>Learning to focus on progress, not perfection, turned out to be essential for building Roominate, and by the time the two met at Stanford, they were ready to take risks. "Very early on, we had plenty of failed prototypes that we tried out with kids," Chen says. "But we kept at it, not afraid to fail, and each time tried our best to come up with the next great idea." </p><p>For them, engineering school was business school - or at least, a version of it. "Being in a rigorous learning environment taught us that not everything is going to happen exactly as you plan it, which is certainly the case with starting a new business," Brooks says. </p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/evantubehd-unboxing-youtube-star-2015-5">This 9-year-old makes $1 million a year opening toys</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="c1M3I2czpfpUbfSp-pk66DP24nakx303" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

How failing a freshman year physics quiz helped 2 friends start a 'Shark Tank'-funded company that's paving the way for a new generation of women in tech

<p><div class="image-container float_right"><div class="image"><p class="source on-image"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/">Flickr/whitehouse</a></p></div></div>Quantum cryptography has yet to deliver a truly unbreakable way of sending messages. Quantum entanglement may change that.</p>
<p>Recent revelations of online snooping on an epic scale, by government agencies which may well have been breaking the law, have prompted some users of the Internet to ask whom you can trust with sensitive data these days. According to Artur Ekert, an Oxford academic who moonlights as director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) in Singapore, one possibility is a defunct Irish physicist called John Stewart Bell.</p>
<p>In 1964 Bell proposed a test to settle once and for all whether <keyword id="867567" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Quantum-mechanics">quantum mechanics</keyword> really is as weird as it famously appears to be, in that it allows for instantaneous <keyword id="24346" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="communication">communication</keyword> between two particles, no matter how far apart they are, on condition that they were once entangled together in the same place. The short answer, as experiments carried out over subsequent decades have shown, is yes, it is. Bell's test, however, also led physicists like Dr Ekert to a remarkable insight: Made sufficiently sensitive the Bell test could be used to guarantee perfectly secure communication - even if the equipment used to send and receive those communications had been sold to you by a manufacturer subverted by your enemies.</p>
<p>The current way quantum theory is employed in cryptography, known as "prepare and measure," works by distributing a secret key, encoded in the way light is polarised, to two people (known conventionally as Alice and Bob) who wish to talk privily with each other. This key is used to encrypt a message so that it cannot be understood, even if it is intercepted. Prepare-and-measure looks good in theory because an eavesdropper (Eve) listening in will perforce give herself away by measuring the light's polarisation, and thus disrupting the system. If that happens, Alice and Bob can ditch the compromised key and ask for another.</p>
<p>However, if Eve can somehow tinker with the sending and receiving equipment (for example by blinding it with a special kind of laser, as happened in one famous quantum hack in 2010, or getting the manufacturer to do something similar), she can hide her disruption, leaving Bob and Alice none the wiser. The technique therefore ceases to be secure. Given recent revelations about Western-government activities in this area, and strong suspicions about pressure the Chinese government puts on the country's computer and telecoms firms, users' fears that their equipment might not be all it says it is are hardly paranoid. The Bell test promises to assuage those fears.</p>
<h3>For whom the Bell tallies</h3>
<p>Bell-based cryptography also works by generating a key based on the polarisation of light. But it begins by using a special machine to produce the particles of light (called photons) in which the message will be encoded. This machine turns them out as entangled pairs. One member of each pair goes to Alice, and one to Bob. For each photon she receives, Alice chooses at random which of two predetermined polarisation angles to measure. For each measurement, she can get one of two results: either the photon will appear aligned with her polarisation axis (call that a one) or perpendicular to it (call it zero). This can be used to encode a digital bit. Bob, for his part, also measures his photon's polarisation. Both of his axes, too, have been arbitrarily set.</p>
<p>Conventional odds in the world of classical physics predict Alice's and Bob's bits will match three times out of four. Add in quantum entanglement, though, and the odds increase to just over 85%. This was the essence of Bell's insight.</p>
<p>If Alice and Bob's measurements agree more often three-quarters of the time, it suggests their photons are entangled. That means they cannot have been intercepted, since any attempt by Eve to do so would inevitably cause them to untangle. If Alice and Bob then each add a third, identical polarisation angle, they can use this extra bit, which they know they must share, to encode the cryptographic key.</p>
<p>The trick is to turn this insight into a practical device, given that 85% is a theoretical maximum that real-world equipment never achieves, because it does not always succeed in turning out entangled photon pairs and may also mislay some of those it does. Christian Kurtsiefer and Valerio Scarani, two of Dr Ekert's colleagues at CQT, have been trying to deal with this. Their photodetectors reach efficiencies of 97-98% and their sources of entangled photons are now "pretty much perfect", Dr Ekert says--producing unentangled pairs less than 1% of the time. The main remaining problem is losses in the fibres, filters, lenses and polarisers that link the source of entangled photons to the detectors. The more such optics there are, the lower the efficiency tends to be. For a system that goes beyond a laboratory bench efficiency quickly drops to 70-80%, which is below the 82% that theory suggests is the minimum needed if the Bell test is to be valid.</p>
<p>A team led by Paul Kwiat of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is trying to deal with this not by reducing the losses but rather by reducing the sensitivity of the system to such losses. Dr Kwiat attempts this by entangling photons in a slightly different, weaker way. Thus entangled, they are more vulnerable to measurement errors but more stable against losses. Last month the team presented their findings to the third International Conference on Quantum Cryptography, in Waterloo, Ontario. They think they have managed to design and implement a scheme in which 75% efficiency is enough to ensure the validity of the Bell test.</p>
<p>Allison Rubenok and her colleagues at the University of Calgary, in Alberta, and Liu Yang and Chen Tengyun, from the University of Science and Technology of China, use yet another approach. Each group introduces a third party who sits between Alice and Bob.</p>
<p>In this scheme, rather than creating and sending entangled photons, Alice and Bob begin by polarising their light pulses at random. Each then sends his or her pulse, whose polarisation is known only to the sender, to the third party, who performs a variant of the Bell test on the two incoming signals. The outcome is successful for those combinations of photons from Alice and Bob that are in the same quantum state. These outcomes do not need to be secret: once publicly announced, they allow Bob and Alice to pick the sequence of bits associated with them as their private encryption key. Crucially, for complicated reasons that have to do with the nature of the protocol, this scheme does not require near-perfect detectors.</p>
<p>Moreover, as the two groups report in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters, it works even if the connecting optical fibres become long enough to be of practical use. Dr Rubenok and her team have tested their version of the scheme on a spool of optical fibre more than 80km (50 miles) long, and also on 18km of working cable installed in Calgary. Dr Liu and Dr Chen have run it successfully over a link 50km long.</p>
<p>It all therefore looks quite promising. Unlike prepare-and-measure cryptography, no tinkering with the photon-generator could go undetected. But inevitably, there is a wrinkle. As Jonathan Barrett, another Oxford academic, points out, the interception need not take place in this bit of the system at all. Instead, the detector Alice bought from a manufacturer subverted by Eve could surreptitiously record the quantum-key data Alice receives, store them in a conventional memory, and then broadcast them to Eve later. That would enable her to decode Alice's earlier messages to Bob.</p>
<p>Dr Ekert reckons this threat is more theoretical than real. The non-quantum parts of the system, whose weakness Dr Barrett is pointing out, are easier to test for interference than the quantum parts that prepare-and-measure bugs hide in--and anyone concerned enough about <keyword id="6355300" type="CITY" weightage="60" keywordseo="security">security</keyword> to bother with quantum cryptography in the first place is certainly going to scrutinise his equipment pretty thoroughly before he uses it. Soon, then, those who wish to communicate completely privily may be able to do so, whatever the world's Eves might try throwing at them.</p>
<p><em>Click <a href="https://subscriptions.economist.com/nwcd">here</a> to subscribe to <keyword id="425741" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="The-Economist">The Economist</keyword>.</em></p>
<p></p>

Quantum Entanglement May Deliver A Truly Unbreakable Way Of Sending Messages 

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/">Flickr/whitehouse</a></p></div><p></p></div>Quantum cryptography has yet to deliver a truly unbreakable way of sending messages. Quantum entanglement may change that.</p>
<p>Recent revelations of online snooping on an epic scale, by government agencies which may well have been breaking the law, have prompted some users of the Internet to ask whom you can trust with sensitive data these days. According to Artur Ekert, an Oxford academic who moonlights as director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) in Singapore, one possibility is a defunct Irish physicist called John Stewart Bell.</p>
<p>In 1964 Bell proposed a test to settle once and for all whether <keyword id="867567" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Quantum-mechanics">quantum mechanics</keyword> really is as weird as it famously appears to be, in that it allows for instantaneous <keyword id="24346" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="communication">communication</keyword> between two particles, no matter how far apart they are, on condition that they were once entangled together in the same place. The short answer, as experiments carried out over subsequent decades have shown, is yes, it is. Bell's test, however, also led physicists like Dr Ekert to a remarkable insight: Made sufficiently sensitive the Bell test could be used to guarantee perfectly secure communication - even if the equipment used to send and receive those communications had been sold to you by a manufacturer subverted by your enemies.</p>
<p>The current way quantum theory is employed in cryptography, known as "prepare and measure," works by distributing a secret key, encoded in the way light is polarised, to two people (known conventionally as Alice and Bob) who wish to talk privily with each other. This key is used to encrypt a message so that it cannot be understood, even if it is intercepted. Prepare-and-measure looks good in theory because an eavesdropper (Eve) listening in will perforce give herself away by measuring the light's polarisation, and thus disrupting the system. If that happens, Alice and Bob can ditch the compromised key and ask for another.</p>
<p>However, if Eve can somehow tinker with the sending and receiving equipment (for example by blinding it with a special kind of laser, as happened in one famous quantum hack in 2010, or getting the manufacturer to do something similar), she can hide her disruption, leaving Bob and Alice none the wiser. The technique therefore ceases to be secure. Given recent revelations about Western-government activities in this area, and strong suspicions about pressure the Chinese government puts on the country's computer and telecoms firms, users' fears that their equipment might not be all it says it is are hardly paranoid. The Bell test promises to assuage those fears.</p>
<h3>For whom the Bell tallies</h3>
<p>Bell-based cryptography also works by generating a key based on the polarisation of light. But it begins by using a special machine to produce the particles of light (called photons) in which the message will be encoded. This machine turns them out as entangled pairs. One member of each pair goes to Alice, and one to Bob. For each photon she receives, Alice chooses at random which of two predetermined polarisation angles to measure. For each measurement, she can get one of two results: either the photon will appear aligned with her polarisation axis (call that a one) or perpendicular to it (call it zero). This can be used to encode a digital bit. Bob, for his part, also measures his photon's polarisation. Both of his axes, too, have been arbitrarily set.</p>
<p>Conventional odds in the world of classical physics predict Alice's and Bob's bits will match three times out of four. Add in quantum entanglement, though, and the odds increase to just over 85%. This was the essence of Bell's insight.</p>
<p>If Alice and Bob's measurements agree more often three-quarters of the time, it suggests their photons are entangled. That means they cannot have been intercepted, since any attempt by Eve to do so would inevitably cause them to untangle. If Alice and Bob then each add a third, identical polarisation angle, they can use this extra bit, which they know they must share, to encode the cryptographic key.</p>
<p>The trick is to turn this insight into a practical device, given that 85% is a theoretical maximum that real-world equipment never achieves, because it does not always succeed in turning out entangled photon pairs and may also mislay some of those it does. Christian Kurtsiefer and Valerio Scarani, two of Dr Ekert's colleagues at CQT, have been trying to deal with this. Their photodetectors reach efficiencies of 97-98% and their sources of entangled photons are now "pretty much perfect", Dr Ekert says--producing unentangled pairs less than 1% of the time. The main remaining problem is losses in the fibres, filters, lenses and polarisers that link the source of entangled photons to the detectors. The more such optics there are, the lower the efficiency tends to be. For a system that goes beyond a laboratory bench efficiency quickly drops to 70-80%, which is below the 82% that theory suggests is the minimum needed if the Bell test is to be valid.</p>
<p>A team led by Paul Kwiat of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is trying to deal with this not by reducing the losses but rather by reducing the sensitivity of the system to such losses. Dr Kwiat attempts this by entangling photons in a slightly different, weaker way. Thus entangled, they are more vulnerable to measurement errors but more stable against losses. Last month the team presented their findings to the third International Conference on Quantum Cryptography, in Waterloo, Ontario. They think they have managed to design and implement a scheme in which 75% efficiency is enough to ensure the validity of the Bell test.</p>
<p>Allison Rubenok and her colleagues at the University of Calgary, in Alberta, and Liu Yang and Chen Tengyun, from the University of Science and Technology of China, use yet another approach. Each group introduces a third party who sits between Alice and Bob.</p>
<p>In this scheme, rather than creating and sending entangled photons, Alice and Bob begin by polarising their light pulses at random. Each then sends his or her pulse, whose polarisation is known only to the sender, to the third party, who performs a variant of the Bell test on the two incoming signals. The outcome is successful for those combinations of photons from Alice and Bob that are in the same quantum state. These outcomes do not need to be secret: once publicly announced, they allow Bob and Alice to pick the sequence of bits associated with them as their private encryption key. Crucially, for complicated reasons that have to do with the nature of the protocol, this scheme does not require near-perfect detectors.</p>
<p>Moreover, as the two groups report in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters, it works even if the connecting optical fibres become long enough to be of practical use. Dr Rubenok and her team have tested their version of the scheme on a spool of optical fibre more than 80km (50 miles) long, and also on 18km of working cable installed in Calgary. Dr Liu and Dr Chen have run it successfully over a link 50km long.</p>
<p>It all therefore looks quite promising. Unlike prepare-and-measure cryptography, no tinkering with the photon-generator could go undetected. But inevitably, there is a wrinkle. As Jonathan Barrett, another Oxford academic, points out, the interception need not take place in this bit of the system at all. Instead, the detector Alice bought from a manufacturer subverted by Eve could surreptitiously record the quantum-key data Alice receives, store them in a conventional memory, and then broadcast them to Eve later. That would enable her to decode Alice's earlier messages to Bob.</p>
<p>Dr Ekert reckons this threat is more theoretical than real. The non-quantum parts of the system, whose weakness Dr Barrett is pointing out, are easier to test for interference than the quantum parts that prepare-and-measure bugs hide in--and anyone concerned enough about <keyword id="6355300" type="CITY" weightage="60" keywordseo="security">security</keyword> to bother with quantum cryptography in the first place is certainly going to scrutinise his equipment pretty thoroughly before he uses it. Soon, then, those who wish to communicate completely privily may be able to do so, whatever the world's Eves might try throwing at them.</p>
<p><em>Click <a href="https://subscriptions.economist.com/nwcd">here</a> to subscribe to <keyword id="425741" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="The-Economist">The Economist</keyword>.</em></p>
<p></p>

<ul><li><strong>Dr Murthy, 45, will serve in the new position alongside his continued duties as the <keyword id="254760" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="us-surgeon-general" source="Orion">US Surgeon General</keyword>. </strong></li><li><strong>As the nation's doctor, the Surgeon General's mission is to help lay the foundation for a healthier country. </strong></li><li><strong>Dr Murthy also commands a uniformed service of over 6,000 dedicated public health officers. </strong></li></ul><br />US President <keyword id="99719" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="joe-biden" source="Orion">Joe Biden</keyword> has nominated Dr Vivek Murthy to serve as America's representative on the executive board of the <keyword id="6356311" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="world-health-organisation" source="Orion">World Health Organisation</keyword>. <br /><br /> Dr Murthy, 45, will serve in the new position alongside his continued duties as the US Surgeon General, the White House said in a statement. <br /><br /> He was confirmed by the US Senate in March 2021 to serve as the 21st Surgeon General of the country. He previously served as the 19th Surgeon General under President Barack Obama. <br /><br /> As the nation's doctor, the Surgeon General's mission is to help lay the foundation for a healthier country, relying on the best scientific information available to provide clear, consistent and equitable guidance and resources for the public. <br /><br /> "While serving as the 21st Surgeon General, Dr Murthy is focused on drawing attention to and working across government to address a number of critical public health issues, including the growing proliferation of health misinformation, the ongoing youth mental health crisis, well-being and burnout in the health worker community, and social isolation and loneliness," said the White House. <br /><br /> As the Vice Admiral of the <keyword id="15168129" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="us-public-health-service-commissioned-corps" source="Orion">US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps</keyword>, Dr Murthy also commands a uniformed service of over 6,000 dedicated public health officers, serving the most underserved and vulnerable populations. <br /><br />The first Surgeon General of Indian descent, Dr Murthy, was raised in Miami and is a graduate of Harvard, the <keyword id="144690" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="yale-school-of-medicine" source="Orion">Yale School of Medicine</keyword>, and the <keyword id="67993" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="yale-school-of-management" source="Orion">Yale School of Management</keyword>, the White House said. <br /><br />A renowned physician, research scientist, entrepreneur and author, he lives in Washington, DC with his wife Dr <keyword id="707423" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="alice-chen" source="Orion">Alice Chen</keyword>, and their two children, it said. <br /><br />SEE ALSO: <a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/business/news/freshers-feel-the-heat-as-it-majors-put-onboarding-on-indefinite-hold/articleshow/94655138.cms">Freshers feel the heat as IT majors put onboarding on indefinite hold</a><br /><a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/business/news/with-950-billionaires-asia-outnumbers-all-other-regions-forbes/articleshow/94644883.cms">With 950 billionaires, Asia outnumbers all other regions: Forbes</a><br /><a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/business/news/upi-is-indias-favourite-payment-mode-with-transactions-worth-30-4-trillion-in-april-june-says-report/articleshow/94642629.cms">UPI is India’s favourite payment mode with transactions worth ₹30.4 trillion in April-June, says report</a>

Vivek Murthy is the new US representative on WHO board

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Verge Genomics</span></p><p class="caption">Alice Zhang, co-founder and CEO of drug discovery company Verge Genomics</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><ul><li><strong>Alice Zhang started Verge Genomics in 2015 with Jason Chen to combine innovation in neuroscience, machine learning and genomics and apply it to the drug discovery process. </strong></li><li><strong>The vision for Verge was to become the first pharmaceutical company that automated its drug discovery engine, helping to rapidly develop multiple lifesaving treatments in diseases like Alzheimer's disease, ALS, and Parkinson's disease where no cure exists today. </strong></li><li><strong>On Monday, the San Francisco-based company announced it had raised $32 million in series A funding, led by Draper Fischer Jurvetson, bringing its total amount raised to $36.5 million.</strong></li></ul><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The drug development process is laden with problems that make it lengthy and expensive. Right now, it takes 12 years and $2.6 billion to get a single drug to market, with <span>the drug discovery and development process costing $1.4 billion</span>. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Verge Genomics, run by 29-year-old Zhang, is trying to address these problems by making drug discovery faster and cheaper. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On Monday, the San Francisco-based company announced it had raised </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">$32 million in series A funding, led by Draper Fischer Jurvetson, bringing its total amount raised to $36.5 million.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Zhang was </span>three months shy of her MD and PhD graduation from University of California-Los Angeles when she left school to start Verge Genomics in 2015 with Jason Chen, who she met during the program.  </p><p>"<span style="font-weight: 400;">I just became very frustrated with the drug discovery process," she said. "It's largely a guessing game where companies are essentially brute force screening millions of drugs just to stumble across a single new drug that works." </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At the time, Zhang also recognized the advancements in neuroscience, machine learning and genomics occurring all around her. Genome sequencing had become more and more affordable, and breakthroughs in understanding how function connects with genes opened a new field of possibilities for exploring disease and health. And there was an opening for an opportunity to guesswork out of drug discovery. The vision for Verge was to become the first pharmaceutical company that automated its drug discovery engine, helping </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">to rapidly develop multiple lifesaving treatments in diseases like Alzheimer's disease, ALS, and Parkinson's disease where no cure exists today. </span></p><p>Recently, other big pharmaceutical agencies like Novartis are also starting to follow suit, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/major-pharma-executives-talk-digitization-of-healthcare-2018-5">adapting technology</a> to different steps of the clinical trial process. </p><p>Verge, 14 people large, functions at full capacity. Not only do they have computer scientists managing the front-end of machine learning, but they also have researchers working in its own in-house drug discovery and animal lab.The team is stacked with <span style="font-weight: 400;">computer scientists, mathematicians, neurobiologists, as well as industry veterans and drug development veterans. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">There are three main problems in drug discovery that Verge is using data and software to tackle. The first is that many diseases like Alzheimer's disease are caused by hundreds of genes. Verge's algorithms on human genomic data can map these genes out. The second is instead of using animal data only for pre-clinical trials, Verge uses human data from day one, which may enable greater insight into how effective the drug actually is on human cells. Drugs that work in mice often <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/04/10/522775456/drugs-that-work-in-mice-often-fail-when-tried-in-people">fail in humans</a>, and that's because they're usually there to serve as primary mammal model. Instead of tediously screening millions of drugs, the algorithm will computationally predict drugs that work.</span></p><p>Verge uses brain samples from patients that have passed away from Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease for its human data, obtained through partnerships with over a dozen different universities, hospitals and brain banks. The company then RNA-sequences them in-house, which allows them to measure the gene expression in its most current state, and it can measure simultaneously how all of the genes in the genome are behaving. This data helps scientists figure out what's actually causing disease in these patients and see if there are connections between genes and disease.</p><p>Verge's scientists can make predictions about what drugs they think will work. They can take a patient's own skin cell and turn it directly into their own brain cells in a dish. Then the predictions can be tested on these brain cells to see if they can rescue them from dysfunction or death - a basic test of drug efficacy. That validation data can feed back into the platform and continuously improve predictions over time, even across different diseases.</p><p>The Verge algorithm identifies drugable targets for treatments, then design drugs accordingly. This is done by mining through human samples to identify groups of genes that are implicated with the disease, and what crucial hub in these gene networks can turn them on or off. </p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The latest investment in Verge will serve to advance its ALS and Parkinson's disease drugs. There are six drugs in development, closer to the clinical end, which are being tested to make sure they're safe and non-toxic. The funding will also be used to expand the number of diseases Verge has in its portfolio. </span></p><p>Emily Melton, a partner at DFJ, told Business Insider that investment in early stage startups is largely about the team, the uniqueness of the idea and the capability and expertise of the research team. But what drew her in most was Zhang. "She was this brilliant founder, with a very organic desire to create an impact," said Melton. "She felt like it was her calling."</p><p>Using system learning to recognize patterns that would otherwise go undetected by the human eye can speed up the process while creating a bigger and better feedback loop, said Melton. "We're rethinking how drug discovery is done, and we're rethinking how therapeutics are developed."</p><p class="tagline"><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/intelligence/ai-in-us-healthcare?IR=T&amp;utm_source=businessinsider&amp;utm_medium=ctgr&amp;utm_term=ctgr_leadgen&amp;utm_content=dhealth_ctgr_leadgen&amp;utm_campaign=dhealth_ctgr_leadgen_ai_in_us_healthcare"></a></hr></p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-if-jump-off-international-space-station-2018-6">What would happen if you could skydive off the International Space Station</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

Meet the 29-year-old who founded a company that's using technology to find treatments for diseases thought to be incurable

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span>Stephanie Borcard &amp; Nicolas mMetraux</span></p><p class="caption">He Xiao Bing, 17 works at Beautiful Hairstyle Salon in Chengdu. This is the door to his dormitory. He doesn't have his own key.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p>
<p>As of 2011, <a href="http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90882/8070999.html">252.78 million people in China</a> were migrant workers. That number will increase by more than <a href="http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/urbanization/preparing_for_urban_billion_in_china">240 million migrants by 2025</a>, putting the total urban population at nearly 1 billion people. Many of these urban-dwelling migrant workers are young people who leave their country homes to work in the big city.</p>
<p>Swiss photographers Stéphanie Borcard &amp; Nicolas <span>Métraux </span>of BM Photo recently documented this migrant phenomenon through the lens of young Chinese hairdressers in the city of Chengdu. The city, while lesser known than Beijing, Hong Kong, or Shanghai, is quickly becoming <a href="http://www.gfmag.com/archives/169-january-2013/12248-cover-a-new-economic-model-for-china.html#axzz2wDwgbYvQ">an economic powerhouse</a> in the country. After taking portraits of the hairdressers, the duo asked their subjects to allow them to photograph their homes. Though cramped and lacking privacy by Western standards, the dorms, apartments, and rooms<span> </span>exemplified the living conditions of other young migrants in China.</p>
<p>Borcard and Metraux shared some photos from the project here, but you can see <a href="http://www.bm-photo.ch/">the rest at their website</a>. They <a href="https://www.facebook.com/BMphoto.ch">share work from their latest projects on Facebook</a>.</p>
<h3>To begin the project, Borcard and Métraux walked the streets of Chengdu for 8 hours a day, walking into every hair salon they encountered to scout potential subjects and ask the owner if they could photograph.</h3>
<h3><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span>Stephanie Borcard &amp; Nicolas mMetraux</span></p><p class="caption">Chen Feng, 20, works at Fashion Representation Salon.</p></div><p></p></div></div></h3>
<h3>The hairdressers are very easy to pick out in a crowd in China because of their style. Their outlandish fashions are not common, except among these hair stylists and karaoke bar operators. </h3>
<h3><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span>Stephanie Borcard &amp; Nicolas mMetraux</span></p><p class="caption">Yi Bo, 19, used to work at Flower Vine Image Design Salon. He eventually left Chengdu to move to his home village.</p></div><p></p></div></div></h3>
<h3>After photographing their subjects, they came back a week later with a translator, who further explained the concept of the project. The translator was key to getting the hairdressers to agree to let them photograph their homes. In Chinese culture, it is not common to allow strangers into your home. <div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span>Stephanie Borcard &amp; Nicolas mMetraux</span></p><p class="caption">Yu Yan, 28, has worked at Only Beauty Salon for the last four years.</p></div><p></p></div></div></h3>
<h3>Most hairdressers live in accommodations provided by the owner of the hair salon, often in the same apartment as the boss. Sometimes there are as many as 10 or 15 people living in the same apartment, dorm-style. "Privacy is nonexistent," Métraux said. </h3>
<h3><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span>Stephanie Borcard &amp; Nicolas mMetraux</span></p><p class="caption">Jin Shan, 18, works at New Dawn Salon.</p></div><p></p></div></div></h3>
<h3>At the back of most of the hair salons was a door that lead to an apartment building where the boss and hairdressers live. "It was like Alice-in-Wonderland to go from the glitzy hair salons through a door into a whole other world," Borcard said. Yang Hao (pictured) lives in the same apartment as his boss and sends money home regularly, despite rarely seeing his family.</h3>
<h3><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span>Stephanie Borcard &amp; Nicolas mMetraux</span></p><p class="caption">Yang Hao, 17, works at Duke Stylish Salon.</p></div><p></p></div></div></h3>
<h3>These two hairdressers must share a bed, which is in the entry hall to their boss's apartment. </h3>
<h3><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span>Stephanie Borcard &amp; Nicolas Metraux</span></p></div><p></p></div></div>Yang Wei works at the Romantic Space Salon and lives with his wife in a small apartment. They are expecting their first child in a few months. <div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span>Stephanie Borcard &amp; Nicolas mMetraux</span></p><p class="caption">Yang Wei, 22, works at Romantic Space Salon.</p></div><p></p></div></div>The hairdressing job isn't all it's cracked up to be. A few months after working at the Flower Vine Image Design Salon, Xin Zeng quit his job to work nights at a local gay bar. Like many migrants, Zeng shuffles through numerous jobs to make ends meet.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image"><p class="source"><span>Stephanie Borcard &amp; Nicolas mMetraux</span></p><p class="caption">Chuan Xin Zeng, 18, used to work at Flower Vine Image Design Salon.</p></div><p></p></div></div></h3>

These Hipster Hairdressers Are The Face Of Modern China [PHOTOS]

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>REUTERS/Andrew Innerarity </span></p><p class="caption">Doug Varrieur practices his firing stance on the firing range with an unloaded weapon in the yard of his home in Big Pine Keys in the Florida Keys March 5, 2014.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Dressed in white coats, a group of doctors <a href="http://www.drsforamerica.org/press-releases/over-2000-physicians-urge-congress-to-end-the-ban-on-cdc-and-nih-gun-violence-research" target="_blank">descended</a> on Capitol Hill on Wednesday morning.</p><p>Their mission: Deliver more than 2,000 signatures from physicians to members of Congress, urging them to reverse a congressional ban on gun violence that was extended earlier this year.</p><p>Little did they know that their push would come just hours before another mass shooting - in San Bernardino, California, where <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/who-are-san-bernardino-shooting-suspects-2015-12">14 people were left dead and at least 21 others injured.</a></p><p>"Just hours after I stood w/ <a href="https://twitter.com/Drsforamerica" class="twitter-atreply pretty-link js-nav" data-mentioned-user-id="25911044"><s>@</s>Drsforamerica</a> to <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/EndTheBan?src=hash" class="twitter-hashtag pretty-link js-nav" data-query-source="hashtag_click"><s>#</s>EndTheBan</a>, another mass shooting in San Bernadino. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/gunviolence?src=hash" class="twitter-hashtag pretty-link js-nav" data-query-source="hashtag_click"><s>#</s>gunviolence</a> is a public health crisis!" <a href="https://twitter.com/CIRPres/status/672181857841115136?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">wrote</a> Hemant Sindhu, one of the doctors involved in the petition, on Twitter.</p><p>The ban, backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA) was renewed in the aftermath <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-statement-on-charleston-shooting-2015-6" target="_blank">of the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting</a> that left nine people dead in June.</p><p><span>It remains in place i</span>n the wake of last week's shooting at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/active-shooter-situation-reported-at-colorado-springs-planned-parenthood-2015-11">that killed three people</a> and Wednesday's mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.</p><p><span>"Gun violence is a public health problem that kills 90 Americans a day," </span>said Dr. Alice Chen, the executive director of Doctors for America, the group that delivered the petitions. <span>"</span><span>Physicians believe it's time to lift this effective ban </span><span>and fund the research needed to save lives. We urge Congress to put patients over <keyword id="6358883" type="PERSON" weightage="100" keywordseo="Politics">politics</keyword> to help find solutions to our Nation's</span><span> gun violence crisis."</span></p><p>As <a href="http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-07-02/quietly-congress-extends-ban-cdc-research-gun-violence">Public Radio International</a> (PRI) has reported, the <span>House of Representatives Appropriations Committee voted to reject an amendment in June </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">that would have allowed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to study the relationship between gun ownership and gun violence.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The reasoning? "A gun is not a disease," and therefore falls outside of the CDC's research domain.</span></p><p><span><span>"The CDC is there to look at diseases that need to be dealt with to protect public health," then-House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said at a press conference at the time.</span></span></p><p><span><span>"I'm sorry, but a gun is not a disease. Guns don't kill people - people do. And when people use weapons in a horrible way, we should condemn the actions of the individual and not blame the action on some weapon."</span></span></p><p><span><span><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Twitter</span></p><p class="caption">Doctors for America physicians urge removing the ban on gun-violence research.</p></div><p></p></div></div></span></span></p><p><span><span><span>The fight over research on gun violence goes back a couple decades. In the 1990s, the CDC funded and backed gun-violence research done by Dr. Fred Rivara, a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the University of Washington at Seattle Children's Hospital. He found that having a gun in the home increases the risk of homicide and suicide threefold.</span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span>The NRA later admonished the CDC for supporting Rivara's findings. Rivera accused the organization recently of working with Congress to try and stifle his and other future research on gun violence.</span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span><span>"[Our research] underwent peer review and was thought to be very solid and worthwhile research," Rivara told PRI's the Takeaway in April. "The CDC stood by our research - they had funded it and they stood by it. Unfortunately, it raised the attention of the National Rifle Association, who then worked with pro-gun members of Congress to essentially stop funding firearm research."</span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span><span>Many CDC employees stopped researching gun violence out of fear they would lose their jobs.</span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span><span><span>"No federal employee was willing to risk his or her career or the agency's funding to find out" if any gun research could be done, <span>Dr. Arthur Kellerman, Rivara's colleague that also worked on the original research that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, said in a </span><a href="http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1487470" target="_blank" class="external-link">December 2012 article</a> published in the journal.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>AP</span></p><p class="caption">In this Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2013 file photo, a Glock representative explains features of the Glock 37 Gen 4 .45 caliber pistol at the 35th annual SHOT Show, in Las Vegas.</p></div><p></p></div></div><br /></span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span><span></span><span>It was "really chilling" for gun violence researchers to see the studies dry up, Rivara said.</span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span><span><span>"Gun deaths and gun injuries as a public health issue are still basically anathema to CDC researchers and anyone who gets CDC funding, which is potentially millions of dollars," The Takeaway correspondent <span>Todd Zwillich told PRI. </span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span><span><span><span>"<span>Congressional prohibition, which was extended in this very vote that we're talking about with that appropriations bill, prevents the CDC from advocating for any form of gun control."</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span><span><span><span><span><span><span>American taxpayers <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/gun-violence-costs-america-more-than-229-billion-every-year-2015-4">pay roughly $12.8 million</a> every day to cover the costs of gun-related deaths and injuries, according to a <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/true-cost-of-gun-violence-in-america">report released in April by Mother Jones</a> on the cost of gun violence in America.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p>CDC data has indicated that guns will kill more Americans under 25 than cars in 2015, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/americas-top-killing-machine/384440/">The Atlantic</a> reported. More than 25% of teenagers ages 15 and older who die of injuries in the US are killed in gun-related incidents.</p><p>As for the ban on gun-violence research, the author of the amendment has said he regrets offering it and thinks it should be repealed.</p><p>"Research could have been continued on gun violence without infringing on the rights of gun owners, in the same fashion that the highway industry continued its research without eliminating the automobile," former Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Arkansas) <a href="http://mikethompson.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/thompson-former-rep-jay-dickey-calls-to-end-federal-ban-on-gun-violence" target="_blank">wrote</a> in a letter released this week.</p><p>He added: "It is my position that somehow or someway we should slowly but methodically fund such research until a solution is reached. Doing nothing is no longer an acceptable solution."</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/prevent-blisters-jogging-running-shoes-sneakers-athletic-shoelace-hole-2015-5">Someone figured out the purpose of the extra shoelace hole on your running shoes - and it will blow your mind</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="lyNnMwdToPHeoBdqEnriXIBVrqyIR6er" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

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