- herrcaptain ( @herrcaptain@lemmy.ca ) English88•4 months ago
Okay, this got me curious. From the wikipedia article on viruses:
Viruses are considered by some biologists to be a life form, because they carry genetic material, reproduce, and evolve through natural selection, although they lack the key characteristics, such as cell structure, that are generally considered necessary criteria for defining life. Because they possess some but not all such qualities, viruses have been described as “organisms at the edge of life” and as replicators.
- Doxatek ( @Doxatek@mander.xyz ) English30•4 months ago
They’re not compromised of cells, can’t self regulate, and can’t replicate on their own and other organisms have to do that for them. The last point being important to our criteria for living. I was never taught as a biologist by anyone that they were alive
- RuBisCO ( @Rubisco@slrpnk.net ) English15•4 months ago
o7
“Obligate intracellular parasite” was drilled and showed up on multiple exams, along with all that you mentioned. I’ve also heard “escaped cellular machinery.”
Absolutely fascinating…if a tad frightening.
- WolfLink ( @WolfLink@lemmy.ml ) English9•4 months ago
There are plenty of organisms we generally consider “alive” that can’t replicate or do other key functions without other organisms.
- Doxatek ( @Doxatek@mander.xyz ) English3•4 months ago
Like what? Sorry my comment posted so many times my phone was messing up
- WolfLink ( @WolfLink@lemmy.ml ) English4•4 months ago
For reproduction purposes, many parasites require a specific host to reproduce in. An interesting example is a worm that mind controls a snail and gets itself eaten by a bird, and then reproduces in the bird. Surprisingly, both the snail and the bird survive this process. (Granted, the difference between this and a virus is the virus uses the RNA decoding infrastructure in the infected cell to reproduce itself, while a parasite just is adapted to reproducing in the environment of the hosts body, but uses its own cells to do the reproduction).
However, there are many, many examples in nature of some essential task (often some part of the energy production/absorption process) that are done by a different organism. Some particularly interesting examples:
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there are a handful of animals that eat plants, absorb the chloroplasts, and use those to do photosynthesis
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In most animals, even in humans, a lot of the digestion process is done by bacteria living in your digestive tract. Some illnesses are caused by issues with the digestive tract bacteria, such as them dying out.
There are other animals adapted to living in environments or using things produced by other organisms. Hermit crabs get their name from their behavior of borrowing shells created by other organisms.
Really the only organism that can truly live “by itself” would probably be something like algae.
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- gazter ( @gazter@aussie.zone ) English4•4 months ago
Are these requirements for your definition of life? Is it possible for us to reproduce without relying on other organisms?
- MindTraveller ( @MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ) English3•4 months ago
There you go defining humans as not alive again
- Drewelite ( @Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com ) English16•4 months ago
Worth mentioning: life is a construct created by humans. We decide if it’s alive, just like we decided if anything else was alive. There’s no definite answer that science can provide on this topic. It can only provide humanity with more facts with which we can contrive a distinction.
- MindTraveller ( @MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ) English2•4 months ago
Yes, everything is a social construct and reality is fake and bad
- umbrella ( @umbrella@lemmy.ml ) English4•4 months ago
ok i’m not a biologist but having a cell structure as a prerequisite for defining life sounds very arbitrary to me.
- smeg ( @smeg@feddit.uk ) English47•4 months ago
- FrenziedFelidFanatic ( @FrenziedFelidFanatic@yiffit.net ) English2•3 months ago
I’ve been to this site hundreds of times, but this is the first time I’ve noticed
xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 3±1 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS at a screen resolution of 1024x1. Please enable your ad blockers, disable high-heat drying, and remove your device from Airplane Mode and set it to Boat Mode. For security reasons, please leave caps lock on while browsing.
- ElCanut ( @ElCanut@jlai.lu ) English2•4 months ago
Of course
- moosetwin ( @moosetwin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English23•4 months ago
fungi are extra alive somehow
- Melatonin ( @Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English22•4 months ago
Is this what some virus really looks like? It looks like Tron-era CGI.
- RuBisCO ( @Rubisco@slrpnk.net ) English20•4 months ago
At this scale we’d be seeing with electrons not photons, and everything would be gold coated. It’s unlikely the head would be transparent. But other than that, not bad. False color gets applied to the B&W EM images, which helps.
Rabies is shaped like a bullet!
- moosetwin ( @moosetwin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English8•4 months ago
hmm yes rabies looks like a bullet because once you are shot with it you are dead
- Zink ( @Zink@programming.dev ) English6•4 months ago
That was my takeaway too. I knew Ebola was a big long shape, so it didn’t stand out much, but then “ohhh of course rabies just randomly looks like invisible nano bullets!”
- grrgyle ( @grrgyle@slrpnk.net ) English4•4 months ago
Dannng. Cool reference pictures, thanks for sharing.
Complex viruses seem almost too complex to function. Just from a human lead engineering standpoint, I can see so many points of failure
- dch82 ( @dch82@lemmy.zip ) English3•4 months ago
Viruses throw dung at the wall and see what sticks.
A real life genetic algorithm, essentially.
- flora_explora ( @flora_explora@beehaw.org ) English5•4 months ago
More or less yes, that’s the type of virus we learned about in biology class at least. Although there are various shapes a virus can have. Like covid that is round or other viruses that look more like bacteria.
- jobby ( @jobby@lemmy.today ) English3•4 months ago
Would you prefer it to have a little hat and mysterious (and unnecessary) white gloves ?
- Xantar ( @Xantar@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English20•4 months ago
Maybe undead ? That would explain all those viral zombie apocalypses.
- eldain ( @eldain@feddit.nl ) English19•4 months ago
🚨 Viral meme detected
- 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️ ( @Kolanaki@yiffit.net ) English14•4 months ago
These fuckers make me think they’re some kind of robot. They look man-made AF.
- Martineski ( @Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English3•4 months ago
Aliens.
- Rusty ( @Rusty@lemmy.ca ) English12•4 months ago
Do prions count as another secret fourth thing?
- OpenStars ( @OpenStars@discuss.online ) English6•4 months ago
I’m basically a needle for injecting drugs into you without consent, fight me (I’ll win anyway, some percentage of time).
- ArcaneSlime ( @ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English4•4 months ago
This little doodad reminds me of Jenova Chen’s old freeware game flOw. Fun little game, but iirc it isn’t free anymore.
- Daxtron2 ( @Daxtron2@startrek.website ) English2•4 months ago
Love his games, Journey is still one of my top 10 gaming experiences of all time.
- ArcaneSlime ( @ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English4•4 months ago
I loved flOw and Flower, but I still haven’t played Journey, I need to get a good ps3 emulator just for that. Also I just checked and the 2006 “student” version of flOw is still free, the 2007 ps3 version is paid.
- Daxtron2 ( @Daxtron2@startrek.website ) English4•4 months ago
Its in steam now and works even better than the original ps3 version! Its also 70% off right now :0
- ArcaneSlime ( @ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English2•4 months ago
Ehhh I guess I need to figure out steam/proton then lol. I haven’t played games in years. Is Flower up there too?
Edit: Thanks for all the advice on steam/proton everyone!
- barsoap ( @barsoap@lemm.ee ) English4•4 months ago
Not much to figure out, just make sure to not get the flatpak/snap. Any non-arcane distro should have a working package, the trick to packing steam being not trying to be smart about things you basically have to give it a libc, gpu, and FHS (chroot or not), it takes care of everything else.
- Cethin ( @Cethin@lemmy.zip ) English1•4 months ago
This should not be seen as advice for anyone but a very small number of people:
There is a good purpose for the flatpak. My use for it is Squad’s anti-cheat uses I think a depricated function in C, and the most updated version of glibc doesn’t support it anymore. The flatpak does contain a version of glibc that works, so I have two versions of Steam installed on my system. I only use the flatpak for Squad, because that’s the only game with that issue.
- barsoap ( @barsoap@lemm.ee ) English2•4 months ago
In principle steam should be able to manage such things by using a different runtime for the game.
- Daxtron2 ( @Daxtron2@startrek.website ) English3•4 months ago
It is! They’re both steam deck verified so they should run on proton!
- Cethin ( @Cethin@lemmy.zip ) English2•4 months ago
The vast majority of games on Steam will just work when you hit play on Linux. There’s not much to figure out. You just need to create an account, download the launcher, and purchase the game. You shouldn’t have an issue figuring it out. If you do, feel free to ask for help.
- MonkderDritte ( @MonkderDritte@feddit.de ) English4•4 months ago
Isn’t metabolism one definition of life? If so, they’re not alive.
- flora_explora ( @flora_explora@beehaw.org ) English8•4 months ago
They actually don’t have a metabolism, that’s why they don’t fall into the definition of life in the first place.
Source Wikipedia: “Although they have genes, they do not have a cellular structure, which is often seen as the basic unit of life. Viruses do not have their own metabolism and require a host cell to make new products. They therefore cannot naturally reproduce outside a host cell”
- MindTraveller ( @MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ) English3•4 months ago
Man, all these biologists going on about cell structure are in for a rude awakening when we run into silicon based life forms. Or even Commander Data
- flora_explora ( @flora_explora@beehaw.org ) English1•4 months ago
A rude awakening? Maybe. But a fascinating one!!
- MindTraveller ( @MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ) English1•4 months ago
Why can’t they be fascinated and produce a universalisable definition now? How am I supposed to trust their opinion of whether a virus is alive if they can’t even get Commander Data right? Commander Data is way easier to philosophically understand than a virus.
- flora_explora ( @flora_explora@beehaw.org ) English1•4 months ago
Sorry, I’m unfortunately too much of a literal, analytical thinker to continue this line of joking. Maybe I don’t even fall into the definition of life myself, who knows…
- MindTraveller ( @MindTraveller@lemmy.ca ) English1•4 months ago
I’m not joking, I genuinely disagree with the mainstream classification of viruses and Commander Data is genuinely an important cultural symbol for these issues.
- flora_explora ( @flora_explora@beehaw.org ) English1•4 months ago
Ah OK, I couldn’t tell. So what would you say would be a better definition and what would you like to see included? I’m not really familiar with Data, maybe some background would be helpful…
- JackGreenEarth ( @JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee ) English2•4 months ago
You commented twice
- MonkderDritte ( @MonkderDritte@feddit.de ) English2•4 months ago
Weird, i didn’t even got a server timeout, which is usualy the cause.
- readthemessage ( @readthemessage@lemmy.eco.br ) English3•4 months ago
Viruses are Schroedinger’s cat confirmed
- Gork ( @Gork@lemm.ee ) English3•4 months ago
I found this to be interesting. The word (and concept) of a virus predates its actual discovery by over 500 years.
The English word “virus” comes from the Latin vīrus, which refers to poison and other noxious liquids. Vīrus comes from the same Indo-European root as Sanskrit viṣa, Avestan vīša, and Ancient Greek ἰός (iós), which all mean “poison”. The first attested use of “virus” in English appeared in 1398 in John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum. Virulent, from Latin virulentus (‘poisonous’), dates to c. 1400. A meaning of ‘agent that causes infectious disease’ is first recorded in 1728, long before the discovery of viruses by Dmitri Ivanovsky in 1892.
- Gamma ( @GammaGames@beehaw.org ) English2•4 months ago
I can’t find anything on the 1728 claim, but I remember hearing that Louis Pasteur coined the term while studying rabies in the 1880s!
- RuBisCO ( @Rubisco@slrpnk.net ) English2•4 months ago
It passed through the bacteria filters! So small that it passes by the filters and it kills–poison, toxin. But wait, it can be diluted to lowest effective concentration, and then with addition of host it grows back to high concentration. What poison does that?
- jobby ( @jobby@lemmy.today ) English1•4 months ago
So what about ‘Mastercard’?
- xia ( @xia@lemmy.sdf.org ) English2•4 months ago
Weaponized information.
- ToxicWaste ( @ToxicWaste@lemm.ee ) English1•4 months ago
While technically phages are viruses, i think it is important to label them as phages.
Typically a virus does not look like a robot. The by now rather well known SARS-CoV-2, with its spherical shape is a more common depiction of a virus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus
Bacteriophage look like little robots and from the view of a bacterium - they probably are the equivalent of a terminator: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage
- bruh ( @bruh@lemmy.ml ) English2•4 months ago
But phages are the most ubiquitous form overall. Maybe not as relevant if you mean viruses that infect humans.