Comments on: Starting from scratch, creating a complete pox virus

By: DEBORAH

DEBORAH — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 17:03:54 +0000

Its a miracle that I am alive today. I encounter herpes virus for good four (4) years and i was cured by Dr. Sambo with his herbal medicine divinespellhome @ gmail. com

By: Missy Barnes

Missy Barnes — Sat, 26 Aug 2017 01:51:08 +0000

Do you feel like smallpox could re-emerge in the next 5 years?

By: Dunc

Dunc — Tue, 11 Jul 2017 14:38:57 +0000

People talk about resurrecting the Mammoth, the Dodo, the Quagga, or the Tasmanian devil, or any number of extinct (or mostly extinct) creatures.

I think you may have meant the Tasmanian tiger (aka thylacine, aka marsupial wolf) there, as the Tasmanian devil certainly isn't extinct, or even "mostly extinct". (Although it is endangered, largely due to a combination of road mortality and Devil facial tumour disease.)

By: Bernard J.

Bernard J. — Sat, 08 Jul 2017 15:29:14 +0000

De-extinction is close to my heart – I have colleagues from my postgrad days working on it. I tend not to comment on it too much for particular reasons, not all entirely unrelated to some of the points in Greg’s piece, but that said I think that there are benefits to exercises such as Archer’s enthusiasm for the thylacine. It’s a flagship for the cost vs practicalities of getting to:

1) the point of having a defined potentially-operational extinct genome,

2) the point of reconstituting it in a surrogate such that it’s possible to get the extinct species back, minus any sort of genetic pudding,

3) the point of having an immunological and non-immunological allelic diversity that will provide a minimum viable population, and

4) the point of learned behaviours that characterised the pre-extinction manifestations of the recovered species, and that are crucial to their integrations into a functioning ecosystem.

Compare the cost of achieving 1-4 with the cost of protecting species and their ecosystems from extinction in the first place, and I suspect the bean-counters will clutch their pearls in horror. It’s such a shame that conservative minds are characterised by an inability to think broadly, and into the future, beyond their own immediate egocentric concerns.

On microbiological tinkering, all I will say is watch that space. This is one of the edges of science where the boundary between fact and fiction is at best akin to the braided ropes used to delineate the queues in cinemas and theatres.

By: Bernard J.

Bernard J. — Sat, 08 Jul 2017 15:07:08 +0000

Hello… …ello… …ello…

Time cube… …ube… …ube…

By: dean

dean — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 23:13:44 +0000

Hers all you need to know about the crank ATMurray and his nonsensical AI “theory”.

http://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html

By: Wow

Wow — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 22:05:44 +0000

Go chew on your car, dude.

By: Mentifex (Arthur T. Murray)

Mentifex (Arthur T. Murray) — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 21:52:04 +0000

Let's not just replace the cattle of Northwest America with extinct megafauna; let us also reverse-engineer the ancient human brain and replace it with robotic megafauna. Yesterday I was able to do some cross-fertilization of ideas in the HTM Forum of Numenta, about which in 2005 I wrote my only Slashdot story. Numenta is where serious AI enthusiasts are taking the laborious approach of reverse-engineering the neocortex of the human brain. Then Mentifex here swoops in and claims to have solved AI with a totally top-down approach to how the mind works. The Mentifex AI Minds are based on theoretical ideas of the macro properties of neurons, such as extending spatially and temporally over a putative MindGrid and having as many as ten thousand synapses with other neurons. The Mentifex Minds use neural inhibition to dislodge briefly topmost ideas in favor of ascendant other ideas. Since Mentifex AI is concerned mainly with neuron-based concepts playing a role in thinking, I reverse-engineer neurons only enough to create AI software that can demonstrably think and reason in English, German and Russian. I hope to poach some great minds who think alike from the Numenta project. It could take a thousand years to reverse-engineer the neocortex, and Science-Bloggers who get tired of waiting for such a bottom-up approach are welcome to try out the ghost.pl top-down AI that runs in Strawberry Perl 5. My goal is to release basic AI software with sufficient intellectual functionality that individuals and teams, even if working in secret, will latch on to my existing codebase, reverse-engineer it, and and create from it even better AI Minds than we tenues grandia are capable of.