The Unsettling Beauty of Lethal Viruses | Hacker News Reader

The Unsettling Beauty of Lethal Viruses

blogs.smithsonianmag.com

19 pointspseut7 comments

Neither E. Coli nor the malaria plasmodium are viruses, which I'm sure is the ignorance of the author rather the the artist. I'd expect better of the Smithsonian.

Glad someone else noted that too.

For the love of god. It's the very first fricking sentence of the article, too. I don't think I've ever quit reading an article so fast.

ignore the article, and watch the video near the end.

I'd have hoped for a proofread by someone qualified, but even the media tend to get this right.

For that matter, a magnification of the viruses wouldn't actually look like that eather. The potrusions that are displayed are lacking. For starters, they're only showing the ones relevant for research, and second the structures on their surfaces are displayed massively bigger than they really are.

Aside from bacteriophages, pretty much every virus is going to look like a perfect circle with small irregularities on it's surface that are barely visible.

Bacteria are the same. There's only a few looks, cylindrical (bacili), round (cocci), round but irregular (stafylococcus), and a few others (rounded cylindrical, snake-like and formless that are less important because they're not the cause of major illnesses).

Btw: if you want to have a more realistic view of how much we actually know about bacteria, analyse the real meaning of MRSA (Methycilin resistant staphylococcus aureus = "grape shaped thing that only slows growth when dipped in methycilin". Needless to say, this is in practice several thousand different bacteria species). And about viruses, we know much, much less. Gives you some more respect for medical research and just how much they're shooting in the dark, and how much data they have to process on every trial.

...if you want to learn about the true beauty of viruses, learn about how they work, how their genetic code is written and "executed" to produce the simplest and smallest possible viable replicator (though not an independent replicator), grab a molecular virology textbook like [1] (it's not that hard - you can skim a more general molec bio book like [2], which is written in a style very friendly to all technically oriented people, including coders). Or check out a really cool virology blog - http://www.virology.ws/ (by one of the authors of book [1]), though latest posts are more about politics and social implications than cool basic science.

I have a feeling that von Newman would be extremely fascinated by modern molecular virology if he'd be alive today, considering his interest for minimal universal replicators [3]. If you think about it, modern computer science may very well owe its existence to von Newman's and Turing's interest in mathematical models of life itself!

(...if you want to learn more about the topic above, just google "von newman universal constructor" or "turing morphogenesis" or "schrodinger what is life" and start exploring, I don't want to spoil anyone's fun of finding out about this for yourselves :) )

--- [1] http://astore.amazon.com/virologyws-20/detail/1555814433 [2] http://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Biology-Cell-Bruce-Alberts/d... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construct...

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