Humanity was for centuries under the spell of smallpox, a deadly disease caused by a virus named variola . Smallpox was eradicated in 1977, but for this to happen, vaccine technology had to be invented. And it was a worldwide vaccination campaign that drove smallpox to extinction . Nothing else would have eliminated smallpox. A human-specific Orthopoxvirus, variola was encoded by a DNA genome. To propagate continuously, variola established endemicity in highly populated human gatherings,...

THE GREAT SICKNESS Centuries ago, a deadly epidemic swept through Mesoamerica. Those who lived through it, called this malady cocoliztli...

ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS Artificial neural networks , also known as deep learning networks, are a type of machine learning algorithm, which can extract exceedingly complex features from input data. Examples of input data features are the words in a sentence or the patterns in an image. In analogy to the huma n brain’s cognitive processes, deep learning networks acquire the ability to identify feature patterns ( learn )  by modulating the activation state of the artificial neurons they are...