Posted on 03/19/2020 8:45:39 AM PDT by central_va
(Excerpt) Read more at opentextbc.ca ...
Just like socialists in academia.
Coffee spew!! Hysterical
WuFlu is an RNA virus,but not all viruses are.
Viruses are acellular, parasitic entities that are not classified within any domain because they are not considered alive. They have no plasma membrane, internal organelles, or metabolic processes, and they do not divide. Instead, they infect a host cell and use the host’s replication processes to produce progeny virus particles. Viruses infect all forms of organisms including bacteria, archaea, fungi, plants, and animals. Living things grow, metabolize, and reproduce. Viruses replicate, but to do so, they are entirely dependent on their host cells. They do not metabolize or grow, but are assembled in their mature form.
It’s creepy science fiction type stuff. As far as I know, they still haven’t decided if a virus is a form of life or just a chemical machine.
It’s a Socialist lifeform. It reproduces by making others do all the work.
So, Socialism really is the oldest disease known to Man.
bttt
Yeah.
4 and three can be simultaneous, other times 4 is prior to 3.
Different viruses do things different ways.
“because they are not considered aliv”
That’s a philosophical debate.
They are, though, alive in that they create copies of themselves, ie reproduce, which propagates their genome.
The fact that they do it parasitically causes the confusion.
“It’s creepy science fiction type stuff. As far as I know, they still haven’t decided if a virus is a form of life or just a chemical machine.”
They decided all life is just a chemical machine.
I'll be out sick that day....
If you get sick with the flu, for example, every infected cell in your airway produces about 10,000 new viruses. The total number of flu viruses in your body can rise to 100 trillion within a few days. That’s over 10,000 times more viruses than people on Earth.NB: I'm taking Carl's arithmetic at face value. It is incomprehensibly mind boggling.If there can be so many viruses in a single person, how many viruses are there in total on our planet? I’ve hunted around for a number, and the one I’ve seen most often is 1031. As in, 10000000000000000000000000000000. As in over 10 million times more viruses than there are stars in the universe. As in, if you were to stack one virus on top of another, you’d create a tower that would stretch beyond the moon, beyond the sun, beyond Alpha Centauri, out past the edge of the Milky Way, past neighboring galaxies, to reach a height of 200 million light years.
Source: An Infinity of Viruses by Carl Zimmer, National Geographic, February 20, 2013.
I’ll wait for the movie.
I suppose that all boils down to a matter of how you classify things. The article points out that classification has changed a lot since the discovery of viruses: “They were initially grouped by shared morphology, meaning their size, shape, and distinguishing structures. Later, groups of viruses were classified by the type of nucleic acid they contained, DNA or RNA, and whether their nucleic acid was single- or double-stranded. More recently, molecular analysis of viral replication cycles has further refined their classification.”
It is still astonishing to me how such an incredibly small parasite can infect a host cell and take over the replication machinery to its own benefit, creating 10,000 copies of itself in each cell before the cell dies.
What would life on earth be like without viruses? Is there some sort of symbiotic relationship such that they are ultimately required for life to exist?
That is a beautiful, succinct, and true syllogism. Well said.
They generally aren’t considered to be a life form. They die outside the host cell and can’t replicate outside the host. They can also be crystallized. I can’t think of a life form that can be cristalized. Probably not terribly relevant.
IIRC the early viral research they were separated by migration in gel by electromotive force. So the ones they found all “clumped” and tended to be related by migration in a field. So the “families” ended up being defined by electrical density.
“Electrophoresis”?
My dad used that method on a project at GE.
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