A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Okay, this got me curious. From the wikipedia article on viruses:
Viruses are considered by some biologists to be a life form, because they carry genetic material, reproduce, and evolve through natural selection, although they lack the key characteristics, such as cell structure, that are generally considered necessary criteria for defining life. Because they possess some but not all such qualities, viruses have been described as "organisms at the edge of life" and as replicators.
They're not compromised of cells, can't self regulate, and can't replicate on their own and other organisms have to do that for them. The last point being important to our criteria for living. I was never taught as a biologist by anyone that they were alive
o7
"Obligate intracellular parasite" was drilled and showed up on multiple exams, along with all that you mentioned. I've also heard "escaped cellular machinery."
Absolutely fascinating...if a tad frightening.
There are plenty of organisms we generally consider “alive” that can’t replicate or do other key functions without other organisms.
Like what? Sorry my comment posted so many times my phone was messing up
For reproduction purposes, many parasites require a specific host to reproduce in. An interesting example is a worm that mind controls a snail and gets itself eaten by a bird, and then reproduces in the bird. Surprisingly, both the snail and the bird survive this process. (Granted, the difference between this and a virus is the virus uses the RNA decoding infrastructure in the infected cell to reproduce itself, while a parasite just is adapted to reproducing in the environment of the hosts body, but uses its own cells to do the reproduction).
However, there are many, many examples in nature of some essential task (often some part of the energy production/absorption process) that are done by a different organism. Some particularly interesting examples:
there are a handful of animals that eat plants, absorb the chloroplasts, and use those to do photosynthesis
In most animals, even in humans, a lot of the digestion process is done by bacteria living in your digestive tract. Some illnesses are caused by issues with the digestive tract bacteria, such as them dying out.
There are other animals adapted to living in environments or using things produced by other organisms. Hermit crabs get their name from their behavior of borrowing shells created by other organisms.
Really the only organism that can truly live “by itself” would probably be something like algae.
Are these requirements for your definition of life? Is it possible for us to reproduce without relying on other organisms?
There you go defining humans as not alive again
Worth mentioning: life is a construct created by humans. We decide if it's alive, just like we decided if anything else was alive. There's no definite answer that science can provide on this topic. It can only provide humanity with more facts with which we can contrive a distinction.
Yes, everything is a social construct and reality is fake and bad
ok i'm not a biologist but having a cell structure as a prerequisite for defining life sounds very arbitrary to me.
Of course
I’ve been to this site hundreds of times, but this is the first time I’ve noticed
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fungi are extra alive somehow
Is this what some virus really looks like? It looks like Tron-era CGI.
At this scale we'd be seeing with electrons not photons, and everything would be gold coated. It's unlikely the head would be transparent. But other than that, not bad. False color gets applied to the B&W EM images, which helps.
Rabies is shaped like a bullet!
hmm yes rabies looks like a bullet because once you are shot with it you are dead
That was my takeaway too. I knew Ebola was a big long shape, so it didn’t stand out much, but then “ohhh of course rabies just randomly looks like invisible nano bullets!”
Dannng. Cool reference pictures, thanks for sharing.
Complex viruses seem almost too complex to function. Just from a human lead engineering standpoint, I can see so many points of failure
Viruses throw dung at the wall and see what sticks.
A real life genetic algorithm, essentially.
More or less yes, that's the type of virus we learned about in biology class at least. Although there are various shapes a virus can have. Like covid that is round or other viruses that look more like bacteria.
Would you prefer it to have a little hat and mysterious (and unnecessary) white gloves ?
Maybe undead ? That would explain all those viral zombie apocalypses.
🚨 Viral meme detected
These fuckers make me think they're some kind of robot. They look man-made AF.
Aliens.
Do prions count as another secret fourth thing?
I'm basically a needle for injecting drugs into you without consent, fight me (I'll win anyway, some percentage of time).
Isn't metabolism one definition of life? If so, they're not alive.
They actually don't have a metabolism, that's why they don't fall into the definition of life in the first place.
Source Wikipedia: "Although they have genes, they do not have a cellular structure, which is often seen as the basic unit of life. Viruses do not have their own metabolism and require a host cell to make new products. They therefore cannot naturally reproduce outside a host cell"
Man, all these biologists going on about cell structure are in for a rude awakening when we run into silicon based life forms. Or even Commander Data
You commented twice
Weird, i didn't even got a server timeout, which is usualy the cause.
This little doodad reminds me of Jenova Chen's old freeware game flOw. Fun little game, but iirc it isn't free anymore.
Love his games, Journey is still one of my top 10 gaming experiences of all time.
I loved flOw and Flower, but I still haven't played Journey, I need to get a good ps3 emulator just for that. Also I just checked and the 2006 "student" version of flOw is still free, the 2007 ps3 version is paid.
Its in steam now and works even better than the original ps3 version! Its also 70% off right now :0
Ehhh I guess I need to figure out steam/proton then lol. I haven't played games in years. Is Flower up there too?
Edit: Thanks for all the advice on steam/proton everyone!
Not much to figure out, just make sure to not get the flatpak/snap. Any non-arcane distro should have a working package, the trick to packing steam being not trying to be smart about things you basically have to give it a libc, gpu, and FHS (chroot or not), it takes care of everything else.
It is! They're both steam deck verified so they should run on proton!
The vast majority of games on Steam will just work when you hit play on Linux. There's not much to figure out. You just need to create an account, download the launcher, and purchase the game. You shouldn't have an issue figuring it out. If you do, feel free to ask for help.
I found this to be interesting. The word (and concept) of a virus predates its actual discovery by over 500 years.
The English word "virus" comes from the Latin vīrus, which refers to poison and other noxious liquids. Vīrus comes from the same Indo-European root as Sanskrit viṣa, Avestan vīša, and Ancient Greek ἰός (iós), which all mean "poison". The first attested use of "virus" in English appeared in 1398 in John Trevisa's translation of Bartholomeus Anglicus's De Proprietatibus Rerum. Virulent, from Latin virulentus ('poisonous'), dates to c. 1400. A meaning of 'agent that causes infectious disease' is first recorded in 1728, long before the discovery of viruses by Dmitri Ivanovsky in 1892.
I can’t find anything on the 1728 claim, but I remember hearing that Louis Pasteur coined the term while studying rabies in the 1880s!
It passed through the bacteria filters! So small that it passes by the filters and it kills--poison, toxin. But wait, it can be diluted to lowest effective concentration, and then with addition of host it grows back to high concentration. What poison does that?
Viruses are Schroedinger's cat confirmed
Weaponized information.