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ADAPTING PRIONS. "A new study, carried out by the Scripps Research Institute, started with the notion that perhaps prions could become resistant to drugs through selective adaptation (i.e. evolution)." https://lnkd.in/eR_TbTu View in LinkedIn

EVOLVING COMPUTER CODE. "Some have argued that neither the geological timescales nor the large populations that are germane to biological evolution will be available to evolving computer malware. However, generation times for computer viruses are many orders of magnitude shorter than even bacterial generation times, and furthermore selective pressures are expected to be much stronger and mutation rates higher, speeding up evolution." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

EVOLVING PRIONS. "Like the role of proteins in epigenetics (adaptation or change in gene expression not caused by DNA), the more molecular biologists dig into proteins the more versatile and important they become. New research shows that includes the ability of prions to evolve." https://lnkd.in/eR_TbTu View in LinkedIn

CONTRARIAN. "Prions are mostly protein. Although protein is a fundamental component of living cell material, prions are not alive. The behave something like viruses, without DNA or RNA yet able to reproduce by forcing living cells to do the reproduction for them." https://lnkd.in/eR_TbTu View in LinkedIn

INFECTIOUS PARTICLES. "Prions are proteins, but they are proteins that are not behaving properly. This is because their normal three-dimensional shape has changed, and they can no longer do their job. But not only can they not do their job, but they actual cause damage to the cells. But what is surprising to researchers about prions is that prions are infectious -- they can make more proteins have the wrong three-dimensional shape, spreading the damage they do." https://lnkd.in/e3zZDuE View in LinkedIn

BIOLOGY AS A TENDENCY. "As fuzzy logic theorist Bart Kosko has said: “biology is not destiny. It was never more than tendency. It was just nature’s first quick and dirty way to compute with meat. Chips are destiny.” https://lnkd.in/dTveM5M View in LinkedIn

HARD TO FIND. "Note that very few compilers will identify orphan code." https://lnkd.in/d9rVas9 View in LinkedIn

LIVING PROTEIN? https://lnkd.in/d7w5k54 View in LinkedIn

ORPHAN COMPUTER CODE. "Dead or unreachable code is code that will never be executed. It manifests itself as variables that are declared but never used, functions that are never called, or code that is skipped because of a branch. Since the dead code is not executed, it is an error, often a logic error. Dead code is created by cavalier programmers. An easy way to create dead code is by use of a goto statement and labels." https://lnkd.in/d9rVas9 View in LinkedIn

PRION PROTEIN FOLDING, or its 3D structure, conveys enough information to change a normal cellular protein into an infectious prion particle. As such, it is a protein gene, a rather controversial concept. https://lnkd.in/e3uKvuP View in LinkedIn