I slept through biology class, could you explain how that's not also true for virii, given that they are also not "alive"?
Dry heat will inactivate prions, but you need 200C for 4 hours or more which is more than most plastics can handle.
Edit: Actually, Carl Sagan wrote his memes in metal (and shot them into the universe) so I take that back.
Prions are a single component. They are proteins with the same amino acid sequence as a protein normally produced by an organism. Except they have been misfolded. The geometry of the misfolded protein is such that it becomes a catalyst to reproduce the same misfolding error. There are no "brains" in them. They can arise entirely accidentally. They're a bit like the ice-nine from Vonnegut's _Cat's Cradle_, in which a crystal of a novel form of solid water that melts at a higher temperature can recruit liquid water to grow the crystal without limit. Each individual prion can misfold any number of same-sequenced amino acid chains.
And like the ice-nine, which melted at a temperature above human body temperature, the prion may be able to survive through more extreme conditions than other forms of the protein.
In the best case scenario, the prion does little more than cause a deficiency of the normally-folded protein forms in the body. In the worst-case scenario, it poisons some other process within the body in its misfolded form.
They force other crystals to be of the same size and shape.
(That's why creamed honey producers put a "starter" crystal in, which is tiny, that forces the honey to produce other tiny crystals.)
Pet peeve of mine, but it looks like you slept through English class as well. The plural of "virus" in English is "viruses". "virus" in latin is a mass word and has no plural, like "sugar" and "air".
Anyway, this is hackernews.
For those of us who grew up in internet hacking communities of the early 90's "virii" was the plural form in the lingua franca. As a descriptivist of great habit, I will continue to use that form.
How about this argument then: "virii" is f*ckin ugly? No? Darn. :-)
Just because a noun is a mass word in one language, it doesn't mean it has to be in other languages that have borrowed the word.
For example, in my language, "lego" is a mass word, and to make a plural you would have to say something like "pieces of lego", but in English, the plural of "lego" is "legos".
[There's a "species" that spread around the Andes and eventually reached itself on the other side---and could no longer breeed with "itself". Genes could still in theory travel all the way around and back to the discontinuous point, however.]
edit: http://i.stack.imgur.com/4VsFW.png will make this less confusing, and quite unintentionally :).
An object is considered to be alive if it consumes energy to create or maintain its own order (in opposition to the general effect of the second law of thermodynamics in the wider system in which it finds itself).
Although this doesn't exclude crystals..! :/