True! Here’s a little additional information since the north is in virus season.
A virus is a protein wrapped in a protective fatty lipid. Heat will melt the fat, then break down the protein. That’s why viruses last longer on surfaces and clothing in the cold season, increasing probability of transmission. A virus can remain intact on a shopping cart handle for up to 24 hours in the winter, for example.
You can also rapidly break down the fatty lipid using isopropyl alcohol, or break down the protein directly using hydrogen peroxide. Be careful using the latter. It can bleach or discolor dyed textiles.
Bats use heat to fly off their viruses, they get pretty bad ones, but when they’re flying Bats get really hot. So it burns them off.
Also, some viruses have evolved into us and ended up serving functions in the human bawdy.
Yup. Up to 8% of the human genome is comprised of ancient viruses.
Virus are a proto-lifeform, same as the creators of computer virus.
I’ve never understood why things have to be binary. There are traits we consider life like and traits we don’t. If you have more life like traits you are more life like. Simple as
As far as I’m concerned, it’s all just varying levels of physics. Strings vibrate, atoms bounce around, molecules interact, substances react, cells form, organs grow, and consciousness emerges. It’s just one long spectrum with a fuzzy and somewhat arbitrary cut-off point to where we determine it life
Physics becomes chemistry becomes biology
Oh for sure. No argument here
I’ve always liked Hank Green’s interpretation of life. In that it’s a dynamically stable chemical system. Rather than a statically stable one. Like how a rock doesn’t change much but a human is changing constantly. Yet both maintain their chemistry in more or less a balanced state
But physics turns out to NOT be a smooth gradient, there are steps, aka quanta, that’s why they call it quantum physics or quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics.
At certain steps - not every step, but at certain mathematically defined points - thresholds are crossed and things behave differently, more energetic or complex phenomena emerge.
Enough of your woke agenda. Keep politics out of science.
/s
Not really living, according to primates with limited knowledge, and arbitrary definitions.
You joke, but it’s still a valid way of doing it.
If we are going be inquisitive in a systematic manner, we have to measure things in comparison, and to start doing that we had to start somewhere, in every single different field. Eventually we got to the speed of light as a constant, figured out the 1/137 fine structure constant, the helical configuration of DNA and RNA, etc., all starting from arbitrary suppositions, getting honed and adjusted by laboratory and thought experiments.
eh. if it evolves, it’s alive.
Viruses are intra-cellular parasites with both a living and a non-living phase. The particle OP pointed to is just a machine the virus makes to make more viruses.
