Hairspray won't do it alone, but hairspray mixed with lipstick and perfume will be toxic, and untraceable.
New Virus Breaks the Rules of Infection
11–20 of 135 posts
Re: New Virus Breaks the Rules of Infection
#12Just a thought: I wonder if the virus uses some form of redundancy encoding like certain RAID or file XOR systems use. I wonder if RNA/DNA has a checksum or data correction code somewhere? It would be really neat if this virus does something like that. It might be why the 5th viral component is not required.
It actually is likely the opposite. Many viruses deliberately avoid checksumming and error correcting, as that's how it generates better modular parts - through errors and variation. Some viruses like HPV actively shut down their host's error-correction equipment, so that they may be more effective (why HPV infections greatly increase chance of cancer). If you have a multi-part system where your factory is producing literally billions of variants of each, and you want better parts, one way to do that is to have each part be slightly different. Those that naturally work best together will go on to be more, well, virulent.
Re: New Virus Breaks the Rules of Infection
#13All I can think about after reading that is how to create some set of logic gates for data transfer. What if different combinations of the parts of a virus could be formed into different actual viruses and produce a single new output variant.
For Example, you could combine 00, 01, 11, 10 and then the two part virus would output the result of a NAND operation. We could have naturally occurring computations in nature.
Each mosquito could be seen as a single "cpu" and it's output would be to infect another mosquito. Not sure how you'd collect all the results though, or how you'd not just have endless cycles... perhaps the life of each individual cell could be encoded in DNA/RNA where two virus parts can only come together if their DNA/RNA has the same "clock cycle" encoded (similar to lamport/vector clocks).
Re: New Virus Breaks the Rules of Infection
#14How is this not called the Voltron Virus?
Re: New Virus Breaks the Rules of Infection
#15I think an alien looking at life on earth might find it very peculiar that so many of our life forms split into 2 independent parts that are unable to reproduce unless they match up with a partner of the opposite "sex". This is no stranger than that -- but it's fascinating to us who haven't encountered it before. The "sex" thing turns out to have big advantages: mostly that it allows for faster evolution by allowing…
Might be strange that we have sexes. Might also be strange that we only have 2 sexes. Many plants have two different generational types (haploid and diploid). Meaning each "generation" alternates between two different organism types. Fungi have both sexual and assexual reproduction [2]. But their sexual reproduction occurs when two cells directly fuse and then undergo meiosis into haploid spores instead of a diploid organism. Haplodiploidy occurs in insects where males are haploid by females are diploid [3]. Sex can be much more complicated than what it is in humans. Alien species may have even more complicated systems for genetic recombination.
[1] http://sciencelearn.org.nz/Contexts/Ferns/Sci-Media/Animatio... [2] https://www.boundless.com/biology/textbooks/boundless-biolog... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy
Re: New Virus Breaks the Rules of Infection
#16All I can think about after reading that is how to create some set of logic gates for data transfer. What if different combinations of the parts of a virus could be formed into different actual viruses and produce a single new output variant. For Example, you could combine 00, 01, 11, 10 and then the two part virus would output the result of a NAND operation. We could have naturally occurring computations in nature.…
How would you order the operations?
Re: New Virus Breaks the Rules of Infection
#17I think an alien looking at life on earth might find it very peculiar that so many of our life forms split into 2 independent parts that are unable to reproduce unless they match up with a partner of the opposite "sex". This is no stranger than that -- but it's fascinating to us who haven't encountered it before. The "sex" thing turns out to have big advantages: mostly that it allows for faster evolution by allowing…
Might be strange that we have sexes. Might also be strange that we only have 2 sexes. Many plants have two different generational types (haploid and diploid). Meaning each "generation" alternates between two different organism types. Fungi have both sexual and assexual reproduction [2]. But their sexual reproduction occurs when two cells directly fuse and then undergo meiosis into haploid spores instead of a diploid…
> Sex can be much more complicated than what it is in humans.
Completely arbitrary anecdotal evidence would suggest otherwise.
Re: New Virus Breaks the Rules of Infection
#18Ok, off tangent a bit, but if you randomly sample mosquitoes, those mosquitos have limited flight range, and you find things about the blood meals they have eaten. Are you at risk of invading the privacy of people who live near the mosquitoes?
Looks like the flight range can vary between 100s of feet and as much as 40 miles or more http://www.mosquito.org/faq#far
They would have to only take a blood meal from a single host and you'd have to be able to correlate the data - but maybe?
Re: New Virus Breaks the Rules of Infection
#19All I can think about after reading that is how to create some set of logic gates for data transfer. What if different combinations of the parts of a virus could be formed into different actual viruses and produce a single new output variant. For Example, you could combine 00, 01, 11, 10 and then the two part virus would output the result of a NAND operation. We could have naturally occurring computations in nature.…
If you are really interested in learning more about genetics and DNA, try reading this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21766/
The Central Dogma and all it's exceptions are fascinating stuff. It all acts like a computer in many ways, but since it has to balance on the edge of statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics and has a very angry set of Maxwell's Demons (say, a lambda virus) always coming in and messing it all up, DNA has evolved many very cool features.
Re: New Virus Breaks the Rules of Infection
#20Surprisingly, sci-news.com has a better writeup on this than NPR - http://www.sci-news.com/biology/guaico-culex-virus-multicomp... “Although multicomponent genomes are relatively common among RNA viruses that infect plants and fungi, this method of genome organization has not previously been seen in animal viruses.” Edit: Thinking about this more, I wonder if this might be some sort of virus crossover vector from pla…
> Surprisingly, sci-news.com has a better writeup on this than NPR
Are sci-news's usual writeups bad ? Why is it surprising ? Other from sci-news seemed fine to me .