If SETI uses off-the-shelf hardware & software — can’t you?

VB EVENT: “We use gaming GPUs,” says Dr. Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI research center. “We use the GeForce series from Nvidia. We use consumer level flash drives.” Siemion is one of the speakers at VB Summit, coming up on October 22-23 in Mill Valley, CA. On Twitter, his team recently posted a […]

Scientists revive an extinct virus using off-the-shelf DNA

It’s no longer far-fetched to synthesize a basic organism. However, a team of researchers has taken that work one step further. They recently reconstituted and reanimated an extinct virus, horsepox, using DNA they’d ordered via mail. The team stitched together multiple gene fragments (each with about 30,000 base pairs) into the complete 212,000-pair horsepox genome […]