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CENTRAL CORE. “One important difference between these polymorphic viruses, as these adaptive variants are known, is that computer viruses only changes form. "Only the package is changed;" the code is not rewritten.” http://www.pcworld.com/article/252103/computer_viruses_could_cross_frontier_into_biological_realm_researchers_say.html View in LinkedIn

THE POLLEN TUBE. “Sperm cells of flowering plants are non-motile and thus require transportation to the egg apparatus via the pollen tube to execute double fertilization. During its journey, the pollen tube interacts with various sporophytic cell types that support its growth and guide it towards the surface of the ovule. The final steps of tube guidance and sperm delivery are controlled by the cells of the female gametophyte.” https://lnkd.in/d9zxv6K View in LinkedIn

PROVOCATIVE QUESTION. “We came to wonder if there can be some kind of convergence between human viruses and computer viruses...It may sound like a scenario for a bad Hollywood movie, but it is not such a stupid question." https://lnkd.in/ddTvp9R View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first weekend on double fertilization in flowering plants. After millennia of random experimentation and brutal winnowing, the reproductive pieces that survived in this group look more like a functional train crash rather than an elegant and streamlined process of passing on genes and generating diversity by outbreeding. This is a poster child of evolution as a blind band-aid process where incompatible systems are bolted together after lineage fusions in a make-do manner. And still, they somehow work against all odds. View in LinkedIn

COMMON GROUND. “The origins of each virus are strikingly different: A computer virus is designed, whereas a biological virus evolves under pressure from natural selection. But what would happen if these origins are switched? Could hackers code for a super-virus, or a computer virus emerge out of the information "wilderness" and evolve over time? Apvrille and Lovet argued that both scenarios are possible.” http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-human-and-computer-viruses-merge-leaving-both-realms-vulnerable/ View in LinkedIn

TELEPATHY. “Ten years ago, the US National Science Foundation predicted ‘network-enhanced telepathy’ – sending thoughts over the internet – would be practical by the 2020s. And thanks to neuroscientists at the University of California, we seem to be on schedule.” https://lnkd.in/e7pQZVU View in LinkedIn

PARASITES. “Both computer and biological viruses, they explain in their paper, can be defined as "information that codes for parasitic behavior." In biology, a virus's code is written in DNA or RNA and is much smaller than the code making up a computer virus. The DNA of a flu virus, for example, could be described with about 23,000 bits, whereas the average computer virus would fall in a range 10 to 100 times bigger.” http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-human-and-computer-viruses-merge-leaving-both-realms-vulnerable/ View in LinkedIn

NOT SCIFI. “Although this possibility may sound like a foray into science fiction, information security experts believe the blurring of the boundaries between computer and biological viruses is not so far-fetched—and could have very real consequences.” http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-human-and-computer-viruses-merge-leaving-both-realms-vulnerable/ View in LinkedIn

“IMPLANTED RFID CHIP can then infect any system reading that chip” https://lnkd.in/eJ2WxX9 View in LinkedIn

ACHILLES MOMENT. “As soon as those devices communicate with an external machine, which in most cases is necessary at some point, they become theoretically vulnerable to computer viruses.” https://lnkd.in/ddTvp9R View in LinkedIn