Category: Uncategorized

Boston public schools map switch aims to New maps amend 500 years of distortion https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/19/boston-public-schools-world-map-mercator-peters-projection?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other View in LinkedIn

BREEDING MACHINES. "Viruses exist for one purpose only: to reproduce. To do that, they have to take over the reproductive machinery of suitable host cells." https://lnkd.in/dPy3Zu6 View in LinkedIn

ARE VIRUSES ALIVE? Perhaps it is best to get on with studying the beasts rather than resorting to old-fashioned opinion-based discourses. Unless, of course, you are in the business of looking for unusual life in unexpected places. Then you need to have a grasp of the possible forms of living things. https://lnkd.in/d6yNyaW View in LinkedIn

SPANISH FLU VIRIS REBORN. "Reconstruction of the 1918 virus and studies elucidating the exceptional virulence and transmissibility of the virus are providing exciting new insights into this devastating pandemic strain." It killed 50-100 million people. We still do not have a vaccine against it. https://lnkd.in/dDh4WMA View in LinkedIn

"MIMIVIRUS has the largest known viral genome (1.18 megabase-pairs) and encodes an unprecedented number of components of the transcriptional, translational and replication machinery, many of which have not previously been identified in viruses." https://lnkd.in/e9h9zTt View in LinkedIn

RESURRECTED VIRUS. "It's 30,000 years old and still ticking: A giant virus recently discovered deep in the Siberian permafrost reveals that huge ancient viruses are much more diverse than scientists had ever known." https://lnkd.in/dEzBSEW View in LinkedIn

"DARWIN provided a great unifying theory for biology; its visual expression is the universal tree of life. The tree concept is challenged by the occurrence of horizontal gene transfer and...by the omission of viruses." We still have not remedied the oversight. https://lnkd.in/e6G-N4S View in LinkedIn

RECONSTRUCTED POLIO VIRUS. "Five years ago, as if to prove that point, researchers from the State University of New York at Stony Brook “built” a polio virus, using widely available information and DNA they bought through the mail. To test their “polio recipe,” they injected the virus into mice. The animals first became paralyzed and then died...“The reason we did it was to prove that it can be done." https://lnkd.in/e--W3GC View in LinkedIn

MIMIVIRUSES. "The issue of life without cellular structure came again to the fore with the 2003 discovery that the large and complex Mimivirus can synthesize proteins. This discovery suggests the possibility that some viruses may have evolved from earlier forms that could produce proteins independent of a host cell." Very confounding. https://lnkd.in/e7AX8A4 View in LinkedIn

SYNTHETIC VIRUSES. "Any viruses can be synthesized de novo ("from scratch") and the first synthetic virus was created in 2002. Although somewhat of a misconception, it is not the actual virus that is synthesized, but rather its DNA genome (in case of a DNA virus), or a cDNA copy of its genome (in case of RNA viruses)." https://lnkd.in/eF3wTsF View in LinkedIn