The Ebola Wars
newyorker.com
The Ebola Wars
1–10 of 129 posts
Re: The Ebola Wars
#2Very well written article, but does anyone else think that the cartoonish image advertisements don't really fit well with the purpose of the article?
The photo of an aid worker removing the body of a dead woman also looks surreal...
Re: The Ebola Wars
#3A sample of the Ebola now raging in West Africa has, by recent count, 18,959 letters of code in its genome; this is a small genome, by the measure of living things.
Does this mean mean Ebola is essentially about 38 kilobytes?
Re: The Ebola Wars
#4A sample of the Ebola now raging in West Africa has, by recent count, 18,959 letters of code in its genome; this is a small genome, by the measure of living things. Does this mean mean Ebola is essentially about 38 kilobytes?
Yes. I wonder if being so incredibly small means that replication is more efficient and intense and is therefore a strong factor behind why it's so virulent.
Re: The Ebola Wars
#5A sample of the Ebola now raging in West Africa has, by recent count, 18,959 letters of code in its genome; this is a small genome, by the measure of living things. Does this mean mean Ebola is essentially about 38 kilobytes?
something like that: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/NC_002549 (I get 21K)
Re: The Ebola Wars
#6A sample of the Ebola now raging in West Africa has, by recent count, 18,959 letters of code in its genome; this is a small genome, by the measure of living things. Does this mean mean Ebola is essentially about 38 kilobytes?
4740 bytes, actually.
There are only four nucleotides ("letters") in RNA. You can encode them with two bits.
Re: The Ebola Wars
#7A sample of the Ebola now raging in West Africa has, by recent count, 18,959 letters of code in its genome; this is a small genome, by the measure of living things. Does this mean mean Ebola is essentially about 38 kilobytes?
38 kilobits = 4.7 kB, but yes.
Here's the complete genome of the pandemic strain (scroll down a bit):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KJ660346
Here's the paper sequencing it. ([edit]: I just realized the New Yorker article is largely about this exact paper -- I commented before reading, sorry). Note that five of the authors died before publication; there's a short tribute accompanying it.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6202/1369.full
http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2014/08/ebolas-heavy-toll-...
Here's another phylogeny of this strain, including github repo:
http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/phylogenetic-anal...
Re: The Ebola Wars
#8A sample of the Ebola now raging in West Africa has, by recent count, 18,959 letters of code in its genome; this is a small genome, by the measure of living things. Does this mean mean Ebola is essentially about 38 kilobytes?
[deleted]
Re: The Ebola Wars
#9A sample of the Ebola now raging in West Africa has, by recent count, 18,959 letters of code in its genome; this is a small genome, by the measure of living things. Does this mean mean Ebola is essentially about 38 kilobytes?
[deleted]
Re: The Ebola Wars
#10Good thing we've been cutting science funding across the board! Doubt the NIH and NSF grants were helping science much anyway.
As a matter of fact, science should be privately funded and privately run. What idiot thought it was a good idea to make scientific research a government mandate?
To thy weary, I say: The market shall provide.
P.S. Yes, I am bitter about the current state of science. I've written about it in great detail before [1][2], but the current fascination with free-market everything has truly made me lose hope for this iteration of society. The free market will work, until it doesn't. Some activities which are absolutely crucial, will not be profitable until it's too late. Medical research is a good example, but there are others (energy sources to replace oil, overproduction of consumer waste, pollution etc.)
Seems like today's societies must learn by sticking their fingers in the proverbial wall socket. So be it.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337837
2. https://hn.algolia.com/#!/comment/forever/prefix/0/by%3AFD3S...