#imagine creating life and not knowing what RNA is

[monards]

rip rhinedottir taking middle school biology probably could’ve saved you

[amstories]

Newsletter #15: January 2024

Dear RNAs,

Is it too late for me to wish you a happy new year? 2023 has been a wild ride for (you and) me because a lot of things happened. Here’s a quick recap before we totally move on to the next year!

2023 RECAP

I don’t even know where to begin. All I know is that 2023 was a fruitful year for me as a creative. I was able to share with you six new stories of love, friendships, and life.

Last year, it was finally time for me to share some secrets with you through the story of Erica and Trey in Secrets We Can’t Keep. After finding out their big secret, we continued to solve some problems that Lara and Alvin we’re having in Problems We Can’t Solve. Later on, we joined Margaux and Cash in finding out whether they were able to reach their dreams in Dreams We Can’t Reach.

This was also the year wherein we slowed down and enjoyed the mundane things in life like commuting. We enjoyed the ride as we commuted to Project Fate with Tanya and Tep. We also learned the basics of commuting in Commuting for Dummies with Isaac and Clara. Lastly, we enjoyed every Crush Hour despite the heavy traffic with George and Bridgit.

Aside from these, I attempted to write a ficlet per week this 2023 but I wasn’t able to finish this challenge. However, it produced 24 ficlets. I’ve written additional two ficlets for Inkspired Inktober, which is another writing challenge that I haven’t finished.

My goal last year was to be consistent in my story updates, which I was able to accomplish since I have updated every Monday last 2023. It became a routine for me to post something new in Wattpad.

I was given the opportunity to be a part of Miss Yennie’s (halfbakedwriter) Writer Tell-All Space as a guest writer. It was a joy for me to share my thoughts and journey as a writer with my fellow creatives. At the same time, it’s a privilege for me to receive some wisdom they have acquired through the years of writing experience they had.

But 2023 does not stop there. This was also the year where new opportunities opened for me. I never imagined myself to be able to publish a book last year but KPub PH allowed that dream I once had when I was a child to come true in the form of Ardor, a collection of short stories about love. Unbelievable! I cannot believe I had my first book signing event last year. What a miracle it has been!

This 2023, our family has grown to 669 followers in Wattpad. And finally, here’s a quick recap to show the growth of my stories. Thank you to everyone who has read (and read again) and supported my stories in many ways. I don’t think I say this enough but know that I read every comment and message you send.

2024 WRITING GOALS

As I have promised since the beginning, I will continue to share stories to the world as long as I have stories to tell. This 2024, my desire is to continue to write stories that would bring life to those who would consume it. Content all over the Internet may not always be good, but as a creative, I want to put out content that would inspire you, make you think critically, educate you about things you may not know yet, or simply just make you feel things.

As a creative, I admit that I also have comfort zones. There may be themes that I simply am afraid to explore because I doubt my audience would enjoy such things. This year, I’m looking forward to stepping out of my comfort zones by exploring new themes to write, expanding my creative platforms outside of Wattpad, and making myself a little bit more vulnerable to my readers to show that I am a human as well.

Last year was all about consistency because I wanted to prove to myself (and maybe to my readers) that I could post regularly. I may have been successful in one way but I also had to learn the rhythm of creating and resting. If I hustled every single time, I’m afraid I would end up in a creative burnout and it’s the last thing that I want to happen to me. That’s why I’m hoping to find the right rhythm for me between creating and resting. I hope that you do the same. Rest is a precious gift. Please find time for it.

Lastly, I know that I wouldn’t be where I am right now without the readers who kept on supporting every little thing that I put out there online. I believe that there’s a human behind every user that I interact with. You, guys, have a story to tell too! And if you’ll let me, I want to know your stories as well. Aside from the group chat and channels I have in Telegram, I really want to have conversations with you.

WRITING PROJECTS

Before I end this newsletter, let me update you about my writing projects this year. Currently, I’m writing five works-in-progress: 1) License to Lab, 2) Ana & Tomi Part One, 3) Pitik Mata, 4) Bad for the Heart, and 5) NLEX: Ang Huling Biyahe.

License to Lab is the fifth installment of MedTech on Duty. It features a medical laboratory technician who has failed his board exams thrice and tries to take it once again. I’ve been writing this since 2022 and I’m working to finish this already because I want to share this story already. But yes, I’m taking my sweet, sweet time to write this one because I don’t really want to compromise the message that I want to tell for the sake of publishing it immediately. Instead, here’s a little quote that I’m offering for now:

“Is it even possible for hope to be transmitted by just staring into the eyes of the person who believes in you the most?”

Ana & Tomi Part One is the first installment of MedTech on Duty. It narrates the college misadventures of the titular characters—Ana and Tomi. I’m exploring themes of platonic soulmates and found family here, so this should be exciting! This story also allows me to reminisce about my undergraduate years in Medical Technology.

“But what if during the bad times, I don’t even have a single person I can run to? Can’t I really survive college alone?”

For my love of novelette trilogies, I started writing Pitik Mata, which is a three-part series that features a trio of friends who go on a venture of rediscovering their passion in photography. I will be pouring a lot of the things I love in this WIP, such as photography, creatives, and trio friendships.

“Ano kaya ang nakikita niya sa lente ng camera niya? Nakikita niya kaya kung paano ko siya tingnan?”

For those who loved You Make Me Sick, I’m sure this WIP will excite you. Bad for the Heart is written in the same universe as YMMS, focusing on the things that may be dangerous for the heart. We’re going to talk about the heart a lot here.

“It’s fascinating how the heart may be the strongest yet the most fragile organ of the body. From the moment you are formed in your mother’s womb up to your final breath, your heart beats so you would live. It never takes a break. For if it does, you will die.”

Lastly, we’re going on a road trip to NLEX: Ang Huling Biyahe with my new beloved quad! This focuses on four friends who love a good road trip away from the busy city but need to part ways at the end.

“And that was her little assurance. That despite every change and transition that is happening in their lives, they will always have NLEX. They will always come back to the place where it all began.”

That’s a total of five WIPs, but please understand that I won’t be able to publish immediately since I’m currently studying for my board exams. Writing stories will forever be precious in my heart but it is also a part of my dream to work in the laboratory. I may not be as active as before, but I will try to come back every now and then to check up on everyone. Until then, I’m going to write offline for a while. If you want to be updated about my progress, you may join my Telegram channel and check my WIP threads.

Here’s a question for you: Among my WIPs, which of these are you looking forward to reading?

Hanggang sa susunod na kwento.

nagkukwento, AM

[starskichild]

3, 6, 7, and 30 for the ask game 💛

AHHHH THANK YOU THANK YOU!! This is my first ever ask so here we go!

3 (Biggest self-insert OC?)

Moth 100%. I've had this oc for years now and they've had alot of growth in the process! Moth went from little baby me in high school making a Sky: Children of the Light oc, to somehow becoming an allegorical shapeshifting reality bending cryptic avatar of my imagination/self consciousness. I love them so much and I put them everywhere. They are truly a guilty pleasure when it comes to my ocs 😂

So yeah, whenever you see this gremlin anywhere in the stuff I make just know that it's a little nod from me that what your looking at may not be all it seems and that things are about to get a little crazy!

Sketch designs for Moth ^^

6 (Do you have any OCs without stories? Will you ever create one for them?)

Hmmm now this is tricky since I love world building and alot of the ocs I make usually just slip right into an already created world OR I just make a whole new world if I like their character enough, and the story for them follows suit. However, I do have some right now that just don't really fit anywhere:

Zuri: (The Flower Child)

My BABY my LOVE my CHILD I love Zuri she is a wholesome lil girl and I want so badly to put her into a story but for the LIFE OF ME I haven't been able to figure out where she goes >:[[

But hopefully I'll figure out something soon >:)

She is a part of a species called the Eeliytes, and the description for the species is as follows:

The Eeliytes (Eels for short), are soft, malleable, highly adaptive, and semi-shapeshifting humanoid creatures that can change their RNA to adapt to basically any circumstance. They can morph their bodies into many different shapes and fit into almost any space (not full shapeshifting more-like how an octopus can change their shape and squeeze into any opening as big as their beak) they can even change their body's temperature and infrared structure to completely avoid temperature and infrared based detection. They are very skilled in harvesting/channeling raw plasma/energy to make and do incredible things (can channel plasma in a way in which humans would describe as magic). They are very carefree and playful in nature and are known for their well-versed scholars and powerful intellect.

Lyla: The Shadow Mother or "Great Shadow"

“Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”

I've had this old lady around for quite some time! She is one of my first ever ocs (back when I was obsessed with dragons weren't we all) and has stayed with me ever since. She was actually one of my first digital paintings too! Back then I didn't have any layers either so oof there are some parts of it that haven't aged well compared to my digital painting skills now, but honestly I'm still proud of that painting and have Lyla to thank for getting me into what I love!

(I should really do an update digital painting of her sometime)

Funny enough she's always been an enigma since I ever created her, so maybe it just fits her character more that she doesn't really exists anywhere, but I still love her anyways and I'll find some way to include her in stuff (っ◔◡◔)っ ❤

Rowan: The Soul Warden, "The Boogeyman"

"D̶̟͓̑̎͛̚ơ̶̢͚̪̞͚͐̋͆̾̆̿́̀ ̷̧̠̦̤̹͎̮̇n̴̡̡͕̩̮̪͔̣͖̜͑͗̑̎̄̐̽̊͘ơ̴̧̹͎̗̯̗͔̙̦̄́̚͜t̴̨̘̖͓͚̑ ̶̡̈́̾̄̕̚͝l̸͖͗͝ỏ̵͕͕̅̌̊̌̎ǫ̷͕̾̐͝͝k̶̛͎̗̤̞̒͊͛͆̚ͅ ̴̛̫͇̙̤̟͕̦̺̹͜i̶͍̘͝n̴̢̢̖̭͇̘̰̱͈̻̒̕ť̶̩̬͖̪̭̘̩̤̐͗̒͛͝ͅö̷͉͐͆̀̚̚ ̸̧̨͉̠̹̞͐͗͒̐t̵͕́́̔̋́͒̄̐͗h̶̩̖̼̫̦̍̀͒͌͒͊ę̶̢̡̡̘̠̲̹͋ ̷̢̺̱̲͙̥͔̈́́̎̊̚͠v̸̰̯̖̇̇͋͝o̸̯̺͕͊̉̎̚͘͜i̷̭̣̮̠̭͎͍͌̑̈́͑́́͘̚͝͝d̵͛̀̋͘͜͝ ̴̢̤̻̰̩͈̟͍̫̺̽͂͊̐̀́̈̓̕͠c̶̡̥̺̖̠̤̒͜͝ḥ̷͔̘̗͙̩̱̾͌̒͒̑͒ǐ̵̧̠̰͕̱͙͇̹̎̎͂͝ͅl̴̤̥̠͔͙̳̙͖̫͒̈͆̈́̉̓ď̵̮̟͚̹́̉́͐̉͆̅͒.̸͓̬̜͎̞͙̥̜͗͜ ̵̛̺̮͓̦̪̲̳̹͚́Ỵ̸̆͒̓̑̇͊͝o̸͙̩̤̯̣̪̹͙̘̽̿͐̎́̉͝ų̵̻̯̰̫̠̫̇͑́͑̊̿̒̌̚ ̴͔̜̽̑̃̈́̂̋̐̓͘͘m̶͓̗̾̇͋̽͝ị̶̡̮͉̮͖̜̰͎͇̉́́̔̎͆͘͝g̴̡̧̡̛̻̟̙̹̰̤̽̉̊̈́̈́̾̐̃ͅh̶̢̧̬̠͙̬̬̭͂͋͠ͅt̸͎̑͌̈̈́̿̃̈́̋͆͝ ̵̦̬̩̙̖̰͂n̶̦̺͚̤̦̖̮̯̍̅̈́̌̍̈́̅̚ö̵͈͇̟̜̫͚̞̰͇́̏́͛̾̔͝͠͠t̵̘̗̹̞͗̽ ̸̪͙̯̓̀̈́̉̽̑́̐̕ļ̴̗̤͚̯̖̫͔͔̣̾͂͊́͒̎̚ḯ̶̝͚̰̱̗ͅḱ̶̻̱̠̆̕e̵̛̗͗̑̈̅̒͘̕͝ ̶̧̡̛̪͒̐̈́w̷̡̪̱̽̐̏̃͋̆̆̕h̷̡͖͉͋̏̌̒͌͑̊͜͠ă̵̯ẗ̶̛̺̳́́̾̋̄͆͘ ̶̟̿̄l̸̢̜̼̣̼̺̖̯̱̊̒̃̅o̵̟̖̱̗̜͙̅͛ơ̸̢̻̲̝̬̟̣͙̈͌̈́̍̏̆̀͘͘ḳ̴̜͒̀̊́̉͠ș̵͍̖̩̻͙̓̐͗̓̄́ ̸̡̨͍̙̰̬͚̳̮͆̐̔̅͂͒̐̈́̚b̴̹̖̣͈͙̟̻͛̊̆͂̒͂͋͑͝a̶̧̡͉̦̭̰̘͉̓̎͊̌̾͊͛̉͘̕c̵̛̖̣͚̠͖̰̘̠͙͊̋̇̋͆̈́̑͘͝ḱ̷̬̞̣͒̾̑̀̓̐͌̈̌.̵͓̭̼̋͒͂̌.̷̩͕̩̖̩̟̄̃́̂̓̓̆́̌"

Now this man is also an oldie I've had for a LONG time. I've had him just as long if not longer than Lyla. The difference between him and Lyla, however, is that he CANONICALLY doesn't fit anywhere and he likes it that way. He's a character that exists on the outside of everything, and is more that an observer than an actual character within my stories. Things also get strange when he's around but don't worry he's nice if only a little strict.

I like to think him and Lyla are friends :D

Ayvos: The Natatori Merchant

Ayvos is a more recent character I've made that was actually inspired off of a dream I had! The dream was about a merman swimming around in the ocean with his trusty sack collecting things to sell to others, so I basically made a whole species around him and made him a merchant because of the dream :D

I don't have much for this guy yet, but I recently thought of some really cool outfit ideas for him so I might return to draw him some more, and it would be nice to get this poor man clothed XD

He is a part of a species called the Natatories, and the description for the species is as follows:

The Natatories (Kelpies for short), are usually nomadic, amphibious/marine-like entities who have a body similar to that of a centaur, and are able to control chromatophores within their skin to help them fully camouflage themselves (basically the same way cuttlefish, octopus, or chameleons change their skin color). They are so good at it that they can basically become invisible from any external presence (which they use for hunting/stealth purposes), and sometimes can change their skin to become completely transparent to show off their translucent organs (which they can sometimes use to communicate nonverbally and/or from a long distance). However, they can't change their body's temperature like the Eeliytes can, and therefore can't hide from temperature or infrared detection. They often keep close together in tight-knit herds, and are very powerful hunters, providers, and warriors with a strong code of defending the peace. However, many also take up the trading profession, so some individuals leave their herd and don't stay in one place for two long.

I have a few other ocs like this but I'll stop for now. Lemme know if you guys wanna hear anymore about this stuff cause I would love to share!

7 (What are your favourite relationships between your OCs? (romantic or platonic!))

OH THIS IS A GOOD ONE!! God I could go on forever with this but my favorites have to be found family/domestic family stuff, plus soft/cute relationship stuff and I have just the ocs for it!

-Hunter and Zenir BY FAR are my favorites for this category they're my g/t bois (Hunter is the giant/human and Zen is the human/tiny) and I love them so much. Hunter is just a big soft himbo man and Zen is a small feral warrior who has a special place in his heart for his man 😭 They are just two idiots in love and I would die for them your honor. They are literally the only characters I've ever had aus for but in every single one they fall in love, just for the fact that THEIR LOVE TRANSCENDS REALITY. Tldr I love my g/t gay bois.

-Tomar, Gabby, and Jack are on this list for obvious reasons cause Tomar is a monster goliath-like man who went and just up and adopted two human kids (the siblings Gabby and Jack) and they are so wholesome together Tomar is just the best father oc in the world he's so nice!

Pic of the goat dad himself with his kids (commission done by @reggie_vermillion on instagram a good buddy of mine I go to college with)

-Leilani and Ogden are another g/t family on this list, I have drawn them before, and I posted the drawing on Tumblr which you can see here, but when I did Leilani was slightly older than when I usually put her at, cause in their main story SHE'S JUST A BABY. Literally, Ogden finds this little baby with no family and just decides to keep her and raise her as his own. This toddler and giant are so soft and cute together I want to draw more of them so badly.

-Melody and Callie are very close runner ups for this category since they are such close friends they are basically siblings. Melody is a human sized bug monster child who is a wholesome lil bean and Callie is a sentient calico mouse who is not afraid of anything. These two are both children and get up to so much chaos together hehehe 😈

Again I could go on forever with this, if you want to interact with my characters and/or ask questions about them feel free!

Finally 30 (How are you doing? <;3)

I'm doing good! <3

Honestly I've been super busy, especially right now getting prepared for my final senior semester starting soon (still can't believe I'm going to graduate soon 😵) and I'm working on a bunch of stuff like work stuff and commissions so I'm just everywhere right now lol. Kind of stressed, HOWEVER this year has been amazing, and mentally I couldn't be better! I found this community this year and it's been so incredible. I can't thank everyone enough with how open and welcoming you guys are! I've done so much this year and I'm very proud of what I've worked on, even though I've felt overworked at times. But! I hope once I'm out of college I'll have much more time to work on the big projects I've been wanting to tackle and interact more with the community!

Again thank you so much anon for asking me my very first ask! How'd I do? Hehehe well this was alot of fun and I'm open for asks anytime :D

Have a nice night everyone and hope to hear from you soon!

-MӨƬΉ

[swinging-from-my-cable]

Because I work with a federal contractor, there's a good chance I will have to get one of the vaccines. Look, it goes with the territory. I live in a state with legal weed and I can't smoke weed, even medicinally, for the same reason. I still think both rules are bullshit, and that what I put in my body should be between my doctor(s) and me. That is a separate argument, one I don't want to have here. Anyway, I've been doing some research. Let me put on my tin foil hat, and I invite you to put on yours.

The J&J vaccine is based on existing, but newer, vaccine technology. It's the same science used to create the HIV vaccine, the one for Ebola (still being designed and tested), and one other, I think. Maybe not as well-established as dead virus vaccines, but still established. They basically genetically engineer a harmless virus to bear a portion of RNA that makes the spike protein. Your body attacks the virus in the vaccine. There is a small (think less than 1 in 100,000) chance of blood clots from this vaccine, which is, unfortunately, about par for most treatments. Almost every treatment, medications, vaccines, surgery, carries a risk of life-threatening reactions. I have a med that I have to monitor my body for a rash because it causes that in less than 1% of people, but it is a sign of a life-threatening allergic reaction. Anyway, the FDA pulled it for a couple months and then said it was fine after reviewing the data. The argument about whether they should have is, again, not one to have here.

The other two vaccine options, Moderna and Pfizer, are mRNA vaccines. The method here is to have the mRNA enter your cells, the cells produce the spike protein, your immune system attacks these self-produced spike proteins. However, this is the first mRNA vaccine, basically at all. At least with recombinant viral vector vaccines we have some data from human trials for other viruses. We had nothing for mRNA vaccines other than animal studies until these two were released (as far as I know). We're now seeing myocardiaitis, limited life cycle efficacy, possibility of miscarriage or fertility issues, etc. Now, these aren't exhaustive and studies are still being proposed, researched, and published. We may find out in ten years our worries were way overblown or things are worse than we imagined. And despite a couple studies showing that J&J recipients have higher antibody counts at six and eight months post-vaccination, the push is for folks who did take that one to, not only get a booster, but get a mRNA vaccine booster.

Does anyone else find this suspicious? J&J got (rightly) pulled for a further investigation into its effects. Despite the increasing evidence of risks, and several countries adjusting dosing schedules, the Moderna and Pfizer are getting pushed more and more heavily. I went on a search to find the J&J and only the local chain of supermarkets and Costco have it. You won't find it at CVS, Walmart, Walgreens, and even some clinics. And that was just a loose internet search, I have yet to call anywhere and double check.

All I can think is that money is involved in multiple somewheres, which...I don't like.

[zamgoods]

Tuesday July 13th 13.7.2021 7.13.2021 7.13.21 194th day/171 days remain Gibbous Waxing Moon 12% illumination/ 88% Shadow

This is the time of month for growing into the fulfillment of things. Like a new born baby having the prospects of life before it. Great potential. So too for the plans of the planners of Liberty. Shrinking your liberty is growing.

Nice.🤐

Little Liberty, gift from France, just made it to DC from spending the 4th of July on Ellis Island facing her Big Sister and will be at the French Embassy a today for July 14th Bastille day, "French Independence Day."

DC, the Capital of The United States of America. DC also is a hint for something else. In case you didn't guess DC Comics that's good because the connection should be made to Marvel Comics. I'm talking about the 2000 X-Men. Now why am I picking on the mutants? I grew up a fan of reading the comics, cartoons and saw the movie at the theater, yeah that's how old I am.

Guess when X-Men was released... it was released...That's right. Bastille Day. 7.14 or 14.7 the 196th Day of the Leap Election Year. The date is most famously associated with the Storming of the Bastille in Paris, the event which escalated widespread unrest into the French Revolution. Bastille Day remains a day of national celebration in France.

Strangely enough, the political stress in this movie is about passing a law that all mutants have to register with the government. This is reminiscent in the 2016 Captain America Civil War movie where the United Nations asks the Super heroes to register like the political issues with Supers in the Incredibles 1 and 2 being banned.

My focus on XMEN is relating that the setting of the movie being on Ellis Island where the UN and world leaders are congregated aside the Liberty Island, where Magneto has a device in the torch of enlightenment and freedom, he wants to expose the leaders to mutating energies to, so they can become mutants.

He wants the leaders to sympathize with mutant plight by making them brothers. The problem is, he doesn't know his machine will kill them eventually. He tested his device on Senator Kelly who turned to primordial slime and then was liquidated to water. Wicked witch of the West melted in water. Basically died.

Interesting that the new Little Statue of Liberty was just on Ellis Island for 7.4.2021 after leaving France on The Havre ship on Juneteenth (Slave Freedom 6.19 or 19.6) and will spend 10 years in US capital at French Embassy.

Little Liberty is 16 xs smaller. This is nearly golden ratio of phi 1.618 divided by 10. There is a divine connection to this proportion as well as the 10 xs factor. 10 years in DC, USA and 10 times smaller. Bastille day is 10 days after US Independence day/ 4th of July.

Also note that the date of Juneteenth written as 19.6 is the same number as the 169th day of the year for July 14th, Storming of Bastille.

FREEDOMS

Franc is currency for freedom, liberty. These words as discussed in other posts really is for nobility, royal bloodlines. So is the little lib statue represent shrinking freedoms for them. The Goy will regain powers, money, land, property, privilege's.

Who is your favorite superhero?

Storm- Wakandan female powerhouse who manipulates weather.

Wolverine-the animal/man with Adamantium metal grafted on his bones who can restore himself.

Professor Xavier (X)-Mind Controller and tracker and handler of mutant youth.

Magneto-Brotherhood of Mutants leader who is a powerful magnet of metal and survivor of WWII concentration camp. former comrade of Professor X.

Cyclops-Laser radiating eyes.

Gene Gray- Omega level mutant with the power of telepathy and telekinesis. Moves stuff and reads peoples minds with her mind. Doctor.

Rogue-Teenage runaway who absorbs mutant energy and life force from everyone else. She is like a vampire of chi. Like the witches or Dark Crystal sucking children and innocents vitality.

Mystique-Is a shapeshifting missing link fish woman. Mimic/copy.

Beast/Dr. Henry Hank Philip McCoy-strong and agile like an ape.

Who am I to judge who the villain and hero is? What if they are all really 2 sides of one coin. Truth be known, These heroes' abilities are abilities of modern tech, social engineering. This is just a hypersigil for manipulating not only man but nature as well.

The mark of the Beast in Revelations and the mark of Caine on his forehead was a crossed letter. Like a t or plus sign. spin it 90 degrees it's an x. + x.

Time we live in is the fear of this disease mutation people, since the vaccine is a genetic RNA that is hoped to go into our DNA. Called genetic splicing, creating genetically modified humans like they do to our plants, crops, animals. There is talk of cellular signals, which are microwaves that cook our food. Imagine what it does to your head with earbuds and phones on our ears pointing to our brains. Magneto wore a special helmet to protect him form Professor X's mind altering powers.

[troger]

TLDR: How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

At a laboratory in Manhattan, researchers have discovered how SARS-CoV-2 uses our defenses against us.

By James Somers

November 2, 2020

Some four billion years ago, in the shallow waters where life began, our earliest ancestors led lives of constant emergency. In a barren world, each single-celled amoeba was an inconceivably rich concentration of resources, and to live was to be beset by parasites. One of these, the giant Mimivirus, masqueraded as food; within four hours of being eaten, it could turn an amoeba into a virus factory. And yet, as the nineteenth-century mathematician Augustus de Morgan said, “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.” The Mimivirus had its own parasites, which sometimes followed it as it entered an amoeba. Once inside, they crippled the Mimivirus factory. This trick was so useful that, eventually, amoebas integrated the parasites’ genes into their own genomes, creating one of the earliest weapons in the immune system.

We tend to associate “survival of the fittest” with lions hunting antelope. But disease—the predation of parasites upon hosts—is actually the most potent force in evolution. “Every single phase of life has been selected to try to avoid parasitism,” Stephen Hedrick, an immunologist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. “It’s driven evolution as hard as it could be driven. Because it’s life or death all the time. And it’s a co-evolution.” Whenever a host develops an immune defense, it perversely rewards the survival of the very parasites that can defeat it. Hosts, meanwhile, tend to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. “Bacterial or viral populations are truly vast in size,” Robert Jack and Louis Du Pasquier write, in “Evolutionary Concepts in Immunology,” and the wide variation among them gives natural selection many candidate organisms upon which to work. Viruses and bacteria also reproduce half a million times faster than we do. Given this “generation gap,” Jack and Du Pasquier write, “one might well ask how on earth we could possibly have survived.”

A clue comes from the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. It spends much of its life marauding alone, eating things. But, when food is scarce, it releases molecules that serve as a flocking signal to others of its kind; the amoebas merge, forming a superorganism of as many as a hundred thousand members. For this multicellular “slime mold” to be effective, almost all the amoebas must give up their ability to eat, lest they prey on one another. The few that retain it don’t eat for themselves; rather, they swallow up debris and dispose of it to protect the organism. The other amoebas, freed from the burdens of offense and defense, form a “fruiting body” that releases spores for reproduction. Although none of the individuals would survive on their own, the collective thrives.

A human being is likewise a society of cells, with a coördinated defense. Our circulatory system doubles as a communications network; our blood vessels have an “endothelial” lining—a surface that is charged with the intelligent routing of immune cells. When ordinary cells are infected by a pathogen, they send signals to their neighbors, who pass them on until they reach the endothelial cells. In response, the blood vessels swell, creating off-ramps through which white blood cells, which are part of the immune system’s circulating defense force, can flow toward the site of infection. This is merely the beginning of our immune response.

Our bodies, like the United States government, make a startlingly large investment in defense. Our bone marrow produces billions of immune cells each day, and then discards most of them. Almost every one of our cells is perpetually scanning itself for evidence of invasion. The system is complex—ask a microbiologist about immunology and she’ll whistle, wishing you luck. Those who describe it often resort to metaphor. Contemplating the enormous amounts of information that it collects and synthesizes throughout the body, Jack and Du Pasquier suggest that “the immune system can be regarded, above all else, as a computational device.”

This device is so finely tuned that we seldom notice it at work. Our guts burble with foreign microbes outnumbering human cells roughly ten to one, but the good are seamlessly sorted from the bad; every day, some of our cells grow into cancers, but the immune system dispatches them before they become dangerous. On a recent camping trip, I was bitten three times by some kind of insect while putting my arm into a jacket sleeve. Who knows what entered my bloodstream. Almost immediately, three welts formed; a few minutes later, the welts came down. In moments like that, it is easy to assume that we hold the advantage over the parasites.

On Friday, March 6th, a purified sample of the novel coronavirus arrived at the laboratory of a virologist named Benjamin tenOever, at the Icahn School of Medicine, in East Harlem. Many virology labs focus on a single pathogen, but tenOever’s studies dozens of viruses and how they change the cells they infect. During the winter, tenOever and his team were focussed on the flu. But, as the coronavirus pandemic began to escalate in the U.S., they initiated a side project, infecting lung cells in a dish with sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, and studying the results. TenOever posted their preliminary analysis to Twitter on March 14th. Within a week, a program manager at the Defense Department e-mailed to ask about the research. Two weeks later, Defense gave tenOever a $6.3-million grant to find out what the new virus was doing to our immune systems.

Born to Dutch parents, tenOever grew up in rural Ontario. Now forty-three, he approaches his work with an amused, easy confidence. On March 26th, he gathered his team and they discussed their plan. They would take half a dozen viruses—including sars, mers, and the new coronavirus—and induce infections in hosts, starting with cells in a petri dish and graduating to ferrets. They’d study the results to understand what made the new coronavirus unique. Their goal was to have results in three weeks.

The infections took place inside the lab’s Biosafety Level-3 facility, a series of nested rooms in which each is kept at a lower pressure than the one surrounding it, so that air flows inward and up an exhaust chute containing sensitive filters. In the “warm zone,” where there is always the danger of being exposed to a live virus, you must wear a gown, two sets of gloves, two sets of shoe covers, a respirator mask, a face shield, and a bouffant cap. You work with your arms under a hood, protected by an extra set of disposable sleeves. When you’re finished with your experiment, you disinfect this gear and throw it into an autoclave—a kind of kiln—where it cooks for twenty minutes. To return to the “cold zone,” you remove your shoe covers before stepping over a red line. In New York, at the end of March, these precautions had a whiff of the absurd: in a city where around three thousand new coronavirus cases were being diagnosed each day, you were more likely to be exposed to a highly pathogenic virus in your neighborhood.

A Ph.D. student named Daisy Hoagland, who had herself just recovered from a mild case of covid-19, prepared the samples for analysis. Using a shaker machine and test tubes loaded with sand and ceramic pellets, she turned a suspension of ferret lung cells—some from infected animals, and others from members of the control group—into a homogeneous juice, then separated the solution in a centrifuge that generated fifteen thousand g’s. It is painstaking work. (“I listen to a lot of podcasts,” Hoagland said.) Using a pipette, she carefully transferred the topmost layer, a pink liquid, into another tube, which she centrifuged again, until she had a purified sample of RNA. This she handed off to her colleagues Rasmus Møller and Maryline Panis for sequencing. The process takes sixteen hours to complete, and Møller, who during the height of the pandemic lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, often biked home at dawn over the Pulaski Bridge.

Whereas the sequencing of DNA defined molecular biology in the early two-thousands, the sequencing of RNA defines it today. If you imagine a cell as a kind of computer, then your DNA contains all the software that it could possibly run. It is a somewhat astonishing fact of life that the exact same DNA is shared by every cell in your body, from the skin to the brain; those cells differ in appearance and function because, in each of them, a molecular gizmo “transcribes” some DNA segments rather than others into molecules of single-stranded RNA. These bits of RNA are in turn used as the blueprints for proteins, the molecular machines that do most of a cell’s work. If DNA is your phone’s home screen, then transcription is like tapping an icon. By sampling the RNA present in a group of cells, researchers can see which programs those cells are running at that moment; by sampling it after the cells have been infected with a virus, they can see how that virus substitutes its own software.

TenOever’s team quickly discovered that sars-CoV-2 was uncannily good at disrupting cellular programming. A typical virus replaces less than one per cent of the software in the cells it infects. With sars-CoV-2, tenOever said, about sixty per cent of the RNA in an infected cell is of viral origin—“which is the highest I’ve ever seen. Polio comes close.” Among other things, the virus rewires the alarm system that cells use to warn others about infection. Normally, as part of what is known as the “innate” immune response—so called because it is genetically hardwired, and not tailored to a specific pathogen—a cell sends out two kinds of signals. One signal, carried by molecules called interferons, travels to neighboring cells, telling them to build defenses that slow viral spread. Another signal, transmitted through molecules called cytokines, gets a message to the circulatory system’s epithelial lining. The white blood cells summoned by this second signal don’t just eat invaders and infected cells; they also gather up their dismembered protein parts. Elsewhere in the immune system, these fragments are used to create virus-specific antibodies, as part of a sophisticated “adaptive” response that can take six or seven days to develop.

Usually, the viruses that humans care about are successful because they shut down both of these signalling programs. The coronavirus is different. “It seems to block only one of those two arms,” tenOever told me. It inhibits the interferon response but does nothing about the cytokines; it evades the local defenses but allows the cells it infects to call for reinforcements. White blood cells are powerful weapons: they arrive on an inflammatory tide, destroying cells on every side, clogging up passages with the wreckage. They are meant to be used selectively, on invaders that have been contained in a small area. With the coronavirus, they are deployed too widely—a carpet bombing, rather than a surgical strike. As they do their work, inflammation distends the lungs, and debris fills them like a fog.

In late May, tenOever’s team shared its findings in the biweekly journal Cell. In their article, they argued that it’s this imbalanced immune response that gives severe covid-19—which can sometimes cause blood clots, strange swelling in children, and ultra-inflammatory “cytokine storms”—the character of an autoimmune disorder. As the virus spreads unchecked through the body, it drags a destructive immune reaction behind it. Individuals with covid-19 face the same challenge as nations during the pandemic: if they can’t contain small sites of infection early—so that a targeted response can root them out—they end up mounting interventions so large that the shock inflicts its own damage.

The gears of the immune response that come apart in covid-19 were discovered slowly, in a blundering way, as though science itself were recapitulating evolution. In a sense, there are several immune systems. In health, they coördinate with and balance each other. But a machine with so many moving parts is, inevitably, vulnerable.

Immunology as we know it began in earnest in 1882, at the Italian seaside. Ilya Metchnikoff, a Russian zoologist who would later help popularize yogurt in Western Europe, had developed an obsession with digestion, and with the process by which one cell eats another. In his memoir, Metchnikoff described the insight that would define his career. His family had gone to the circus, but he’d stayed home, “observing the life in the mobile cells of a transparent starfish larva” through his microscope. Suddenly, a thought occurred to him:

It struck me that similar cells might serve in the defense of the organism against intruders. Feeling that there was in this something of surpassing interest, I felt so excited that I began striding up and down the room and even went to the seashore in order to collect my thoughts. I said to myself that, if my supposition was true, a splinter introduced into the body of a starfish larva . . . should soon be surrounded by mobile cells.

Metchnikoff immediately performed the experiment, using a thorn from a rosebush in his garden. Sure enough, he saw cells surrounding the foreign body.

At the time, leading biologists, including Louis Pasteur, didn’t think of hosts as actively defending themselves against pathogens. If it was often impossible to get diseases twice, then that was because we became inured to them, like alcoholics to liquor, or because some unknown quantity of illness within us was “used up” as each disease ran its course. Immunology had advanced only haltingly since 1730, when the clergyman Thomas Fuller speculated that each person was born with “Ovula, of various distinct Kinds, productive of all the contagious, venomous Fevers we can possibly have.” According to this theory, an infection was actually an impregnation; each “egg” could be fertilized only once.

Using dyes to distinguish cells under a microscope, Metchnikoff helped show that the body actively defended itself. In fact, specialized cells responded to intruders in a process he described as “phagocytosis,” or cell-eating. One kind of cell-eater, called a “neutrophil”—because it can be stained only by pH-neutral dyes—swarmed to the site of the infection first. Larger cells called “macrophages” followed, absorbing both the invaders and the neutrophils into their “amoeboid protoplasm.” Neutrophils and macrophages, Metchnikoff found, lived in tissues throughout the body—a standing army.

Metchnikoff’s findings were promising: he had uncovered what would become known as “cellular” immunity. At the same time, other researchers seemed to be making progress in an entirely different direction. Emil von Behring and Shibasaburō Kitasato, two biologists working in Berlin, injected guinea pigs, goats, and horses with diphtheria and tetanus toxins. They found that, from the victims’ blood, they could derive “antitoxins” capable of conferring protective immunity on other animals. (Von Behring won the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work, in 1901.) It wasn’t clear what these antitoxins, later called “antibodies,” were made of. Still, von Behring and Kitasato had discovered what came to be known as “humoral” immunity, and it had nothing to do with cells eating other cells.

There came to be two camps: the cellularists, aligned with Metchnikoff, and the humoralists, aligned with von Behring. The feud over the origins of immunity was political and cultural as well as scientific. Metchnikoff was working at the Pasteur Institute, in Paris, and his followers, who believed that cell-eating was the basis of immunity, were mostly French. Von Behring’s supporters, who focussed on antibodies, were German. The humoralists won the mainstream in 1897, when a biochemist named Paul Ehrlich published a theory explaining how antibodies might work. In his paper, Ehrlich drew a toxin as an amoeboid blob with small nubs jutting out of it, each differently shaped; the antibodies were like little tadpoles whose mouths sometimes fit exactly onto the nubs. It was these variations in shape, Ehrlich argued, that allowed the antibody system to adapt to new pathogens and cripple them. For the first time, the elusive concept of immunity to specific diseases, so important and yet so poorly understood, felt tangible. “Helped in no small measure by the pictures which Ehrlich published,” Arthur M. Silverstein writes, in “A History of Immunology,” antibodies became “the principal object of interest to almost all immunologists.” Although Ehrlich and Metchnikoff shared a Nobel Prize for their contributions to our understanding of immunity, Ehrlich’s account eclipsed interest in Metchnikoff’s cell-eaters for nearly fifty years.

As biologists grew expert in the distillation of “curative serums,” the great quest in immunology became figuring out how antibodies were made, and how there could be so many kinds. It seemed that a person’s antibody repertoire was limitless: biologists found that the immune system could quickly create antibodies to fit synthetic chemicals never before seen in nature.

For the first half of the twentieth century, the going theory was that the invading element—the “antigen”—served as a template around which a corresponding antibody was molded. Only in 1955 did scientists discover the much stranger truth. It turned out that the cells that produce antibodies—called B cells, because they were first discovered in the bursa of Fabricius, an organ that does for birds what bone marrow does for humans—can produce only one kind each. Its structure is random, and nearly every B cell is discarded unused. If, however, an antibody created by a B cell happens to match some part of an antigen, that B cell will not just survive but clone itself. The clone incorporates many mutations, which offer the possibility of an even better match. After a few generations, an antibody with the best fit is “constructed” through a process of mini-evolution that occurs continuously in our lymph nodes and spleen. (Our ancestors the bony fish adapted the machinery of the B-cell system from an even more ancient parasite.)

The vividness of this picture—a weapons factory deep in our bodies, working on the principles of Darwinian selection—further etched the formula “immunity equals antibodies” into the biological imagination. And yet problems remained that only the cellularists could solve. During the Second World War, severe burns treated with donor skin grafts became more common. But the donor skin was often rejected by the body. When scientists examined the site of a rejected graft, they didn’t find antibodies. Instead, they saw swarms of a previously unknown kind of immune cell. Later, the attacking cells were shown to come from the thymus, a small, spongy organ, then thought to be vestigial, that straddled the esophagus. They were named T cells as a result, and became an object of fascination. T cells were incredibly destructive but somehow selective. They knew the difference between self and other.

The balance between protection and self-destruction had always been a theme in immunology. Since Ehrlich’s time, allergies had been seen as a misdirected immune response; in the nineteen-forties, scientists learned that certain precious parts of the body—the eyes, the reproductive organs, the brain—are actually walled off from much of the immune system. (Ehrlich himself discovered the “blood-brain barrier,” a mesh too fine for phagocytes and even tiny antibodies to penetrate.) Now the question of how the body distinguished between foreign and domestic tissue focussed itself on skin grafts and T cells.

Earlier, in mice, researchers had identified genes that affected the success of organ transplants: they called this collection of genes the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC, from the Greek histos, for “tissue.” In the sixties, a human version of the MHC was found. The genes turned out to be a blueprint for a remarkable system designed to distinguish self from non-self. Fragments of proteins built inside our cells are loaded onto tiny molecular rafts, which ferry them to the cell surface for inspection by T cells. Meanwhile, in the thymus, T cells are trained as inspectors: they are presented with rafts containing protein fragments, some of which are natural to the body. Any T cell that ignores its raft, or that goes on the attack in response to self-generated fragments, is destroyed. Competent inspectors are set loose to search for foreign material. They look for cells that display unfamiliar protein parts in their rafts and kill them.

This is how skin grafts are detected and rejected; how incipient cancers are disposed of; how cells that have been co-opted by viruses are rooted out. Together, B cells and T cells allow the human immune system to update itself as fast as our cells can replicate. But their power comes with risks. The immune system’s adaptive weapons aren’t always precise. Allergies affect somewhere between ten and forty per cent of the global population; as many as four per cent of people suffer from debilitating autoimmune diseases. And parasites could find ways to hack the system. “The invention of acquired immunity was like escalating a war with an omnipotent opponent,” Hedrick, who is a T-cell expert, writes. Our new weapons could be turned against us.

By the late eighties, it no longer made sense to contrast cellularists and humoralists. They had both been right; it was just that they saw different parts of the immune system depending on where and when they looked. Phagocytes were often present at the moment of infection. Antibodies in the blood, which could take days to emerge, pursued invaders outside the body’s cells, while T cells used MHC to peer inside those cells, destroying the ones that had been infected by viruses or corrupted by cancer.

Still, mysteries remained. At a 1989 symposium, the immunologist Charles Janeway described what he called the field’s “dirty little secret”: a vaccine containing an antigen designed to elicit antibodies wouldn’t work unless an extra irritant, or “adjuvant”—usually a harmless chemical or bacterium—had been added. Why wasn’t the antigen enough to jump-start the creation of antibodies? “To be quite honest, the answer is not known,” Janeway said. His suspicion, though, was that the process couldn’t begin unless the innate immune system—with its interferons, cytokines, and epithelial cells—had sounded its alarms first. Without marching orders, the standing army remained on call.

An innate system has to anticipate its enemies—a seemingly impossible task, given their stupendous variety. It wasn’t until around 1997 that Janeway began to understand how such anticipation might be accomplished. About a decade earlier, a pair of biologists named Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus had found a gene that affected development in fruit flies. Nüsslein-Volhard had called it Toll, using the German word for “great.” (“Das ist ja toll! ” she exclaimed, upon making the discovery.) Another scientist, Jules A. Hoffmann, learned that the same gene was involved in the fruit-fly immune response; Janeway, with the help of Ruslan Medzhitov, showed that a version of it was also present in humans, and employed in some of the white blood cells that are the innate immune system’s first responders. Through experiments with human cells, they showed that the gene coded for what came to be called a “Toll-like receptor,” which could recognize a particular molecular motif—a building block of bacterial membranes. It was as if evolution had noticed that, while many cells built their houses out of oak or brick, dangerous bacteria always seemed to use pinewood. Why not make a pine detector?

Immunologists soon discovered a second Toll-like receptor, then a third; they started giving them names like TLR4 and TLR5. Whole new families of “pattern-recognition receptors” were found. Each receptor, ingenious in its design, recognized some characteristic microbial or viral signature—a kink in a virus’s RNA, a crenellation in a microbial cell wall.

At long last, a picture of the whole system was coming into focus. It was all interconnected. Innate immunity kicks off the immune response, as cells at the site of infection use their receptors to recognize and combat invaders, and release interferons and cytokines to raise the alarm. Various types of white blood cells respond, having been routed to the infection via the bloodstream. They identify and eat foreign cells, returning the digested bits, via the lymph nodes, to the thymus and the bone marrow, as intel. In the days that follow, antibodies and killer T cells—the weapons of adaptive immunity—are built to spec. Everything plays a double or triple role. Antibodies, for instance, don’t just attach to invaders to block their entry into cells; they also tag them so that they’ll be easier for white blood cells to find and eat. The innate and adaptive arms ramp up each other’s destructive abilities.

Here, again, Hedrick sounds a cautious note. “Such a scheme should worry any systems analyst,” he writes. “A potentially lethal mechanism controlled by positive feedback is a recipe for runaway destruction.”

In late March, a thirty-two-year-old man of Dutch ancestry was admitted to a hospital in the Netherlands. He had difficulty breathing, and a CT scan showed an opaque haze spreading in his lungs. He was given a diagnosis of covid-19, and spent sixteen days in intensive care; four days after he was moved out of the I.C.U., one of his lungs collapsed. He recovered enough to be sent home nine days later. His twenty-nine-year-old brother, who lived in a different house, got sick at roughly the same time, and died. Their parents had moderate symptoms.

When scientists learned that a second pair of young brothers—twenty-one and twenty-three years old, of African ancestry—had also had severe cases of covid-19, they sought to study all four men. By sequencing the genomes of the men and their parents, the researchers hoped to find an anomaly that might explain why some young people, particularly men, had such bad outcomes.

The Dutch team found something that echoed tenOever’s theory about the way in which sars-CoV-2 rewires the cellular alarm system. The four men all had an ineffective variant of TLR7, a Toll-like receptor that recognizes viral RNA. When it works, TLR7 helps produce interferons, which tell nearby cells to increase their antiviral efforts. When it doesn’t, the alarm is silent, and the infection spreads. This genetic abnormality had made the virus’s work dramatically easier. The raiders had come to an unlocked house.

This spring, a clinical trial in the U.K. gave interferon-beta, a synthetic version of the molecule, to a random selection of a hundred and one patients hospitalized with covid-19. The trial found that those who received interferon early in their infection were seventy-nine per cent less likely to become seriously ill. Researchers agree that timing is crucial. In the early days of a coronavirus infection, an interferon boost might help your innate immune system contain the virus. Later, though, it might be harmful; at that point, your adaptive immune system could already be out of control, and you might need an immunosuppressant, such as the steroid dexamethasone. (Last month, President Trump received dexamethasone as part of his treatment for covid-19; he was also given a drug that contained lab-engineered antibodies capable of fighting the virus alongside, or ahead of, his body’s own adaptive response.)

The genes for TLR7 are on the sex-linked X chromosome. That could be a partial explanation for why men suffer from severe covid-19 more often than women. But a TLR7 deficiency is likely to be rare—far rarer than the incidence of severe covid-19 among young people. There are almost certainly other genetic or environmental factors that weaken the interferon response. In mid-September, research published in Science showed that some covid-19 patients with bad outcomes had “autoantibodies” that were attacking their own interferon; another article published in the same issue outlined a genetic flaw related to TLR3, which is also involved in the interferon response. (As many as fourteen per cent of severe covid-19 cases may be attributable to one of these two conditions.) The more researchers study our immune response to the virus, the more complexity they find. According to some theories, how things go for you could depend on how many viral particles you’ve inhaled, and on whether they reach your lungs when you breathe them in. If you’ve had a cold recently, it’s possible that the T cells you developed to fight it could partially fit the coronavirus. Vitamin D levels might matter, because Vitamin D can help control inflammation. Harmful autoantibodies could be responsible for the persistent symptoms suffered by covid-19 “long-haulers.” All of this is still being explored.

The immune system uses feedback to stay balanced, like a gymnast on a beam. If a light breeze blows, the gymnast might sway a bit; sensing this, she’ll shift her weight to return to center. But, given a strong enough push, she’s prone to overshoot with her reaction and, from the other side, overshoot again until she falls. Many factors contribute to the slip—a tight hip flexor, a strained calf, moisture in the air—each magnifying the force of the shove.

Older gymnasts tend to be less agile. The same goes for the immune system, which is why covid-19 disproportionately affects the elderly. The already high case fatality rate for sixty-five- to seventy-four-year-olds more than triples in people seventy-five and older. This age distribution is unique to the coronavirus. Kids are more susceptible to the seasonal flu; children and young adults who had the swine flu in 2009 were hospitalized the most, while the pandemic flu of 1918 hit adults in their twenties and thirties the hardest. (Perhaps their immune systems overreacted, or older people had acquired immunity to similar strains.) “The difference of risk and profile, young versus old—I don’t think anyone has seen an infectious agent behave quite like this before,” Richard Hodes, the director of the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, said, of the coronavirus.

The lopsidedness of the virus means that vaccines might not be as effective in older patients, even with double the dose, or after repeated inoculations. The beauty of a vaccine is that it relieves us of the task of completely understanding the virus; its package of antigens simply presses the On button of the great machine. Helping older people may require a more fine-tuned approach, tailored to the particular way this virus destabilizes the immune system. What we have learned so far suggests that it isn’t just that being older makes you weak, and that covid-19 preys on this weakness; the disease’s mechanism of action is actually amplified in the aging body.

For this reason, about a month after beginning their coronavirus investigations, the researchers in tenOever’s lab switched from ferrets to hamsters. Ferret immune systems are highly responsive, and the animals were getting better too quickly. “They look a lot more like kids,” tenOever said. By contrast, some hamsters, when infected with the virus, “actually develop respiratory distress. We see a lot more infiltration in their lungs.” In older hamsters, as in older people, innate immunity is less likely to contain the virus and adaptive immunity is slower to turn on and off. The hamster ends up wildly dysregulated. “The difference between these two outcomes really comes down to, as you get older—” TenOever paused. “Getting older sucks. Everything breaks down, even at the simplest of levels.”

As we age, our immune systems stiffen up. “If I had to respond to an insult—bacteria, a virus, a trauma, a lesion—the response is slower and is less strong,” Luigi Ferrucci, who studies the aging process and the immune system at the National Institute on Aging, told me. But, at the same time, the system becomes chronically activated. Cytokines circulate at a constant, high level in the blood, as though the body were at all times responding to some attack. This is true no matter one’s health. “Even in individuals that are extremely healthy, extremely well nourished, have no disease, and they’re taking no drugs, there are some inflammatory markers whose concentration increases with aging,” Ferrucci said. Think of the welt that rises with a bite, then imagine the same process—swelling, redness, stiffness, the accumulation of pus—slowly pervading the body. Your level of inflammation contributes to your “biological” age—which is not always in perfect lockstep with your chronological age—and increases your risk of developing cardiovascular disease, cancer, and dementia; it contributes to what geriatricians call “frailty.”

A phenomenon known as cellular senescence is partly responsible for the body’s increasing inflammation through time. As cells age and divide, small errors accrete in their DNA. These errors could lead to cancer, among other maladies. And so cells police themselves. When they detect decay in their DNA, they stop replicating and begin emitting cytokines, as though asking the immune system to inspect and destroy them. The accumulation of senescent cells may contribute to severe covid-19: according to the current theory, Ferrucci said, they could “expand tremendously the cytokine storm,” in which a runaway feedback loop leads to a sudden spike in inflammation throughout the body.

Adaptive immunity suffers with age, too, but for different reasons. The thymus itself atrophies. (On a restaurant menu, thymuses are called sweetbreads. “Sweetbreads come from young calves,” Hedrick told me. “If you were to try to harvest the thymus from an old bull, you’d get . . . nothing.”) When you’re young, with a short history of exposure to pathogens, your thymus produces new T cells at an extravagant rate. But as you age production slows, and the cells differentiate. Some live indefinitely as “memory T cells,” carrying with them a record of their defeated foes.

Certain viruses use up more T-cell memory than others. Around twenty per cent of an older adult’s T-cell repertoire is devoted to fighting a single virus: human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), a strain of herpes that usually has no symptoms. It would be ironic if, in some small way, HCMV makes it harder to survive covid-19. Unlike sars-CoV-2, which spreads without hiding and so causes extensive damage, HCMV is a master of disguise. When infecting a cell, the virus turns off that cell’s MHC system. No cellular raft delivers evidence of the infection to the surface. Still, this isn’t enough to avoid detection. Our immune system has invented a weapon, the “natural killer” cell, that looks specifically for cells without functioning MHC systems. And so HCMV evolved to create a decoy MHC raft, designed to fool the natural killers.

As a parasite, HCMV is almost perfectly adapted to its host; able to spread without attracting attention, it does nothing but consume resources. The thymus is one place where such cleverness leaves its trace. The practice of science is another. Many of the workhorse tools employed by molecular biologists—including the enzymes used by tenOever’s team to sequence RNA, and the crispr gene-editing system, perhaps the most important scientific discovery of our time—were once either weapons or defenses in the microbial arms race. It’s there, at the crucible of life and death, that biological innovation happens fastest, leaving us with technology for mounting a new kind of defense.

The last time I spoke to tenOever, in late July, his team had begun a search for treatments. In the BSL-3 lab, Møller was infecting hamsters; the plan was to give the animals candidate drugs, sequencing their RNA through the entire process of infection and treatment. By examining patterns in the data, the team could find out which drugs were better at undoing the coronavirus’s reprogramming. TenOever made use of a handy way of visualizing what was happening in the cells. He could turn the genetic analysis into an inkblot-like map, showing which parts of its genome each cell was activating. “You can build a landscape, if you will,” tenOever said. If the coronavirus shifted the landscape to the northeast, they would look for drugs that pulled it southwest. They were testing four good candidates a week like this.

It was an impressionistic way to look at an immune system. But the system was not designed to be legible; it was, of course, not designed at all. For years, Robert Jack, one of the authors of “Evolutionary Concepts in Immunology,” taught a class on immunology to students just beginning their Ph.D.s. Bright and enthusiastic, the students struggled to untangle the immune system’s feedback loops. Jack told me, “We tend to look at these systems and say, ‘Wow, who would have thought of that? That’s incredible. That’s so fantastic. It does this incredibly complicated job, and it does it really well!’ ” He took a breath, then continued. “Whereas, in reality, the immune system has simply, in the face of pathogen attack, staggered from one emergency to the next. It just uses whatever is lying around. It is hoping against all possibilities to try to survive a little bit longer. Whatever crazy solution it comes up with—so long as it works, it will be accepted.” The result is a system of great flexibility and power, which, pushed the right way, can be made to collapse upon itself. ♦

[gil-notskajla]

I know it's 2020 but I rewatched [prototype] gameplay because i remmembered that it was cool and angsty af but did not really remmember what happened in it except Alex turning evil in sequel for some reason and it seemed weird.

Soo im watching this shit for 3 hours because im professional time waster and i still don't get it. Viruses, i mean the viruses viruses, rewrite genetic code of attacked cells, they can't create hiveminds or any minds in fact, viruses aren't built to do such complicated tasks - virus is just some RNA (not even DNA) closed in protein and sent off to the world to cause maychem in animal, fungal, protista and floral kingdoms. In this situation - animal kingdom. Dr.Alex Mercer 1.0 steals the virus and smashes the container, gets infected and murdered by guys sent to catch him. Some fans speculate that that's the point where Alex Mercer has died including some in game characters and Zeus (Alex Mercer 2.0), unaware of not being Alex, took his place. But that's bullshit my dudes. Alex Mercer is still Alex Mercer but mutated and amnesiac (probably because he was braindead and memories are stored by continiuos bio-electrical reactions, neuro transmitters and ionic concentration on neuron membrane). Why Alex is Alex and not Zeus? Because conciousness is stored in organ, not genetic material (not to mention our cells mutate all the time, thats why we have moles and cancers). If conciousness was stored in genetic material, than twins would share conciousness, clones would share conciousness and those whoose genome would change would lose conciousness, not to mention that our cells get replaced several times durring our lives - the body you are in is not the body you were born in, yet, you are still you (of course neurons live really really long). We could argue that other infected were agressive and cannibalistic but that's not conciouss behaviour, these are instincts, there was no goal in their doing. Other infected were like: holy shit, prey animal, food! Of course some were controled by Greene but she was, like Mercer, an anomaly and her will was hers, not virus'. She just hated everyone and was evil as fuck. But back to Mercer, we could also argue that he died back there when his brain got destroyed by lack of oxygen - but than every new conciousness gets deleted every single time he gets shot in the head durring the game. My hipothesis is that there is one conciousness per one brain and is a series of biochemical processes on neurons in one specific body, uncopiable and irreplacable. By that hipothesis (which is very bold but way more specific than anything the game offers us, or better put, doesnt offer) Alex Mercer got infected, torn appart by bullets, his brain got damaged but did not die entirely because if it did he would have a way worse amnesia than just not knowing anything and he didnt get shot in the head

, virus already has infected him and probably kept his brain alive-enaugh soo that he would at least know english when he wakes up, virus managed to work on what alive cells were left (yes, when you die, your cells in several places in the body still live off of the reserves and substances in cytoplasm for a while) the virus, unlike most viruses, had ability to... (basing on my knowledge im trying to imagine how this would work) manages to reanicate dead cells and with, at this point, sheer willpower fix the damage caused by bullets and give Alex's heart a kick from the God themself to start working and that's when he wakes up durring the autopsy.

Giving that analysis, Alex Mercer is still Alex Mercer because he is technicaly same organism but modified, amnesiac because of brain damage caused by lack of oxygen between moment of getting mass-shot and fixed by the virus and i have no idea who gave him the doctor title if he really believed that guy that some Zeus replaced him. Like, Alex sweetie, viruses are fucking dead matter, ok? You are a mutant but not a new being. But he has amnesia soo I guess we can forgive.

Edit: Dunno where to put memory stealing aspect, here is good enaugh spot. I have no goddamned idea how this would work: maybe he doesnt damage the brain of the victim, somehow connects the brain to his own, transfers knowledge and than disposes it (however the hell this would work)? There was this one dude who killed himself soo Alex wouldn't consume him and get his knowledge, destroyed his harddrive basicaly soo he can't read it, and that's really cool of game creators to think about it. Respect. This also kinda prooves that Alex didn't actually die the first time he died, when he was still 'human'.

And the very end? He got caught in explosion but he must have created some form of safe box for his brain alone and got rebuilt from this and some other leftovers of him and a crow because it was already stated by doctors suicide that destroyed brain or something resembling a brain whatever he has at this point bust be preserved to keep memories. And he knows what happened at the end of the game. Period.

But than second part happens and holy shit i'm soo angry, you have no idea. I mean, ok, the story itself was fine but Mercer aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaicant why why why who allowed this plot disaster to happen!?!? In part one Alex did his absolute best to prevent the virus, to stop infection, to stop gentek and to bring peace. A beautiful, beautiful ending, a satisfying ending. Finnish the task and boom! He can live in peace, potential immortality before him, a world to see, a knowledge to gain, a life to live and no danger in sight or at least no real danger for him in particular. Perfect situation to start over. But what do they decide to do? Well we need to make sequel because first game sold. Soo we will ruin this whole character we have build instead of, i dont know, giving him new objective, expanding his character, and we will turn him into another evil guy dissapointed in life who lost faith in humanity and destroys his work from the previous game because we need something absolutelly devastating to happen soo new protagonist will have something to fight for AND also we will make those already a bit fucked up and evil bio engeneering corporations come back even more evil soo that making Mercer not only evil but genarally badly written character will have NO SENSE WHAT-SO-EVER and just, I'M JUST----!!!!!!!

[arrowstheory]

BIOLOGY, i.e. beating foam: 4 am, laminar flow again keeps me awake. Where does biology come from here. ? It's simple, there would be no life without laminar flow. so BIO. Panta rei as our friend, Mr. Tarej used to say. And if everything flows, where is life here? I tell. Every rule has exceptions, or else there is no rule without exception. Laminar flow is the flow of a "river" where all spaghetti flow parallel to each other. there are no whirlpools or intersections of these streams. And here comes life, i.e. the exception to the rule, but when something begins to whirl and loop, creating a separate, rotating, even for a moment, a moving object.

now BIOLOGY or BEATING FOAM. there is such a theory not very popularized but correct, it is called the MEMBRANE THEORY, it says that life was possible because there were balloons separating something from the rest of the soup. If there was a stable vortex in the balloon, moving in its spin, and all this surrounded by a membrane, then what? what's next?

It was the driven whirling parts of the vortex in the balloon that could react with each other more quickly. The membrane protected against decay and forced the internal substances to act, whatever they were, with each other. Sometimes releasing something from the balloon through the membrane or sometimes absorbing something inside.

THE FILM of balloons, which is permeable to some substances and not to others, is the basis of everything. How a very general film is built: imagine a soap bubble. So we have some soap particles in a water solution. and they form pairs with each other in such a way that each soap molecule has a hydrophilic, hydrophilic end, and a water-repellent or hydrophobic end, the pairs of soap molecules are arranged next to each other with these ends of "legs to heads, heads to heads", so the ends of the felt side by side, and the phobic ends together too. Long rows form like railroad tracks, and then many railroads side by side. Now, of course, water is repelled from the hydrophobic surfaces, and instead, it is attracted and collected on the side of the surface formed by the hydrophilic heads. We already have a targeted, functional machine that cannot be avoided, and self-repairing. It recreates and develops itself. Is it already alive? If you cut it smaller, it will continue to rebuild and work! Is this breeding already? She knows what to do and does it - so is her function of machine water sorting already thinking? Well, no, but it's a self-repairing machine.

What's next? Where's that soap bubble film? Well, what happens is that the hydrophobic surfaces remain on the outside of the film, and inside we have water held on both sides between the hydrophilic surfaces. that is, the film looks like this in section.

The important thing here is that such a film repels the external water and does not let out the water collected inside the bubble. And the strangest thing is that it is itself held by water bound between two water-loving layers made of soaps of particles arranged by ordinary electrostatic forces, because there is NO chemical reaction between them, nor between water particles !!!!

Thus, such a film can retain water, but it can pass, for example, fats or metals, the film itself may contain admixtures, for example, soap stains.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING: in order for the soap bubble and any other membrane bubble to exist, you need an INTERNAL PRESSURE, i.e. a VIR, which is the exception to the rule. Because when the river flow is laminar, it is death, or rather, biological stillness. Only vortices and membranes create life.

THE CELL as a membranous city, it should be understood as such.

A cell is like a walled city like walls, there are gates there that open to Na, K, H e-ATP, ADP and H2O and P as independent phosphorus. Behind the gates is the endoplasmic reticculum, something that hardly anyone talks about and is the most important thing in the cell. it is a maze of streets and inlets, there are highways between mitochondria to ribosomes, and bridges and a checkpoint where they check documents. There are also vacuoles (water lakes that act as garbage dumps, where all those poisons that cannot be excreted out through membranes fall and are stored.) and the main lock in the form of a cell nucleus. The organs in a cell are called organelles. They all send energy and pulsate with their rhythm until a spindle forms in the womb, signaling the division. Then the DNA is reproduced with the help of a key, i.e. a single half of the standard RNA, as well as the division of the entire bubble into new, less tired and less cluttered cells. Of course, all the time the bubble through the membranes and the endoplasmic reticculum communicates with the outside, absorbing energy and expelling its secrets. through the door in the membrane. this state is called SECRET (the cell sweats as if, but can also shoot energy or chemicals that it has to get rid of.) okay, no more talking, I'm going to sleep. Anyway, without membranes and internal turbulence or pressure, no chance of life. bye Bye

[biostudyblog]

The Cell

 (The first person to discover and document a living cell was named Anton van Leeuwenhoek, in Holland. Matthias Schleiden in 1838 expanded upon the idea of cells, by concluding all plants are made of cells. In 1839, Theodor Schwann concluded that all animals are made of cells. Then, Rudolf Virchow in 1855 came to the conclusion that “where a cell exists, there must be a pre-existing cell. These conclusions lead to the formation of cell theory. As we understand it now, cell theory states that:

All living things are made of cells

Cells are the basic unit of all organisms

All cells arise from preexisting cells

All cells are enclosed by a membrane responsible for regulating what goes in and out of the cell. They also contain nucleic acid, which contains genetic information that directs the cells activities and controls inheritance. (More on genetics coming soon!) There are two kinds of cells: Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes. 

Prokaryotes have no nucleus or membrane-bound organelles. For example, bacteria are unicellular prokaryotes. 

Eukaryotes have a nucleus and membrane-bound organelles. Most complex life, including us, the pets we keep as companions, the flowers we grow in our gardens, and the worms who keep our gardens alive.

Here is an example of a prokaryotic cell:

Differences between eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells:

Prokaryotic cells do not have membrane-bound organelles, like a nucleus, while eukaryotes have organelles surrounded by a membrane, like mitochondria.

Prokaryotic cells contain a single, circular chromosome, while in eukaryotes, chromosomes are linear. Human body cells can contain up to 46 chromosomes in each nucleus.

Prokaryotic cells can contain plasmids. Eukaryotic cells do not. Plasmids are small DNA molecules within the cell that are able to replicate independently of the chromosomes.

In eukaryotic cells, ribosomes are much larger than in prokaryotic cells.

In prokaryotic cells, respiration is typically aerobic or anaerobic, while in eukaryotic cells, respiration is mostly aerobic.

Cytoskeletal elements like microfilaments and microtubules which are present in eukaryotic cells are absent in prokaryotic cells.

Most prokaryotic cells are unicellular. While some eukaryotic cells, like euglena and paramecium, are unicellular, many are multicellular and specialised.

Eukaryotic cells are much larger than prokaryotic cells. (The mitochondria used to be its own prokaryotic cell before it combined with other prokaryotes to form a eukaryotic cell, to give an idea for scale.)

Most prokaryotes have tough external cell walls. While there are some notable exceptions, most only have a cell membrane.

Moving back to the development of eukaryotes, the theory of endosymbiosis states just that. Prokaryotes came together and formed eukaryotic cells.

Complex organisms have cells specialised to perform certain functions. For example, humans have all kinds of different cell types, each with shapes and structures that help them do their job. Nerve cells have elongated axons, wrapped in a myelin sheath to help transfer electrical signals. Smooth muscle cells contain fibres of actin and myosin that help them move. Adipose cells have massive collections of triglycerides that allow them to insulate, and store energy. Columnar epithelial cells can contain microvilli that help increase the surface area within the intestines, improving digestion. Finally, white blood cells contain numerous lysosomes, allowing them to break down intruders, and dead or corrupted cells. 

(No I did not mean to make the white blood cell look like it has a moustache. He, however, does look very dapper.)

While plant and animal cells look incredibly similar, there are some extremely notable differences that make them distinct. Plant cells have cell walls and chloroplasts. 

While animal cells have centrioles and lysosomes. (In plants, the vacuole does what the lysosome does in the animal cell.)

(Yes, the animal cell drawing because we all know that animals are superior and their cells look way cooler.)

Let’s talk about some organelles. It’s nice to think about organelles as a factory, each with their own job to keep the factory running. I won’t use all organelles in this example, as it may get a little confusing with the organelles needed for replication (although, it’s awesome to imagine a factory going through mitosis. Imagine how convenient that would be?)

Nucleus and nucleolus

The nucleus contains chromosomes made of DNA, wrapped with special proteins called histones, in a chromatin network. Chromosomes contain genes, which are bits of DNA that code for polypeptides. It is surrounded by a selectively permeable membrane, allowing RNA in and out. The nucleolus is a nondividing segment of the nucleus, where ribosomes are made. The nucleoli are not membrane-bound but are tangles of chromatin and ribosomes.

In the factory, the nucleus is the boss. It gives the instructions that messenger RNA bring to the ribosomes.

Ribosomes

The ribosomes are where proteins are made. Inside are rRNA, which puts together instructions from the DNA, and creates amino acids, that are connected and joined into a polypeptide chain.

In the factory, the ribosomes are the workers, following instructions from their boss to create the product.

Endoplasmic Reticulum

The ER is a system of membrane channels that live within the cytoplasm. There are 2 distinct types, with their own jobs. 

The Rough ER

The Rough ER is covered in ribosomes and is the site of protein synthesis and transport. 

The Rough ER is the assembly line, where the workers make the product, and moves the product through the factory.

The Smooth ER

The Smooth ER is responsible for a lot. It synthesises steroid hormones, and other important lipids connect the Rough ER to the Golgi Apparatus, detoxifies the cell, and is the site of carbohydrate (glycogen) metabolism.

The Smooth ER is the overachiever that wants a promotion so bad it starts doing everything. No promotion for you Smooth ER, because no one gets fired, retires or quits in a cell.

Golgi Apparatus

The Golgi Apparatus is a flattened sac of membranes, surrounded by vesicles. They modify, package and store what the Rough ER makes. It also moves these substances to other parts of the cell, and to the membrane for transport outside of the cell.

In the factory, the Golgi Apparatus puts products into boxes, preparing them to be shipped. 

Lysosomes

A lysosome contains hydrolytic enzymes and is enclosed by a single membrane. It is the site of intracellular digestion and helps perform apoptosis, which is programmed cell death. This is essential in embryonic development.

In the factory, the lysosomes are the vat of acid, where the employees who do a bad job are pushed into, in order to keep the factory running. (Or, a trash can.)

Mitochondrion

The mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell. (Aka cellular respiration). Cells can have thousands of mitochondria. They are made of an outer double membrane, and a folded inner membrane called cristae. Enzymes used during cellular respiration are embedded in the cristae membrane. They can self-replicate

In the factory, the mitochondria are the electricity, essential in keeping the factory alive and running.

Vacuoles

Vacuoles are membrane-bound structures that store substances for the cell. Some freshwater protista, like amoeba and paramecium, have contractile vacuoles that pump excess water out. Other cells like adipose cells have vacuoles that are designed for storage. 

In the factory, vacuoles are the cupboards, where the excess product is kept. (I don’t think there’s a good example for contractile vacuoles that I can think of.)

Plastids

Plastids are only found in plants and algae. There are 3 types:

Chloroplasts are green because chlorophyll is green. They perform photosynthesis. They have a double outer membrane and an inner one that forms a series of structures called grana, which lie in the stroma. They, like mitochondria, can self replicate. 

Leucoplasts are necessary for storing starch. They do not have colour, and are in roots, like turnips, or tubers, like potatoes.

Chromoplasts store carotenoid pigments that lead to the red-orange-yellow colouring of many plants. They are found in flower petals, which help attract pollinators.

Cytoskeleton

The cytoskeleton is a complex network of protein filaments that extend through the cytoplasm, giving the cell shape and letting it move. It has two structures

Microtubules are thick, hollow tubes that make up the cilia, flagella, and spindle fibres. They are formed from a protein called tubulin.

Microfilaments are made of the protein actin and support the shape of the cell. They are used to form the cleavage furrow when animal cells replicate, to move amoeba by sending out pseudopods, and to allow skeletal muscles to contract by sliding along myosin filaments.

Centrioles and Centrosomes

These organelles are unique to animal cells. They are outside the nuclear membrane and help organise the spindle fibres which are used during mitosis and meiosis. Plant cells have microtubule organising regions which perform similar functions. Two centrioles make up 1 centrosome. Centrioles and spindle fibres have the same structure, 9 triplets of microtubules arranged in a circle.

Cilia and Flagella

Cilia and flagella also have microtubules, arranged in a different way. Cilia are much shorter than flagella, however, both are used for movement.

Cell Wall

Cell walls are not found in animal cells. In fungi, they are made of chitin, and in plants and algae, they are made of cellulose. In plant cells, the primary cell wall is outside the plasma membrane. In some cells, there is a secondary cell wall. In order to replicate, a middle lamella between the 2 cell walls is formed, keeping the daughter cells attached.

Cytoplasm and Cytosol

The cytoplasm is the area between the nucleus and cell membrane. The cytosol is the semiliquid portion of the cytoplasm. In eukaryotic cells, organelles are moved through the cytosol as the cytoplasm cycles. This is a process called cyclosis.

Cell Membrane

The cell membrane is selectively permeable. This means that it only allows certain molecules to pass through. It is called a fluid mosaic, as it is made of many small particles that move around that allow the membrane to be permeable. The membrane consists of a phospholipid bilayer, with proteins dispersed throughout it, and embedded cholesterol giving it stability. Phospholipid molecules have a hydrophilic, polar head, and a hydrophobic, non-polar tail made of fatty acids. Carbohydrate chains on the surface are necessary for cell-to-cell recognition.

Normally, a cell membrane consists of around 60% protein. These do many different things, depending on the protein. For example, ATP synthetase is an enzyme. Some are involved in the sodium-potassium pump bringing ions into and out of the cell. (Remember the salty banana, Sodium ions are normally on the outside of the cell, while potassium ions are normally on the inside of the cell.)

Before I get to cell transport, it’s good to define some important vocabulary.

Selectively permeable: The substances that are able to pass change depending on the needs of the cell. For example, the axons of a neuron contain gated channels that open or close depending on the presence of a stimulus.

Solvent: What a solute is dissolved into. For example, water

Solute: What is dissolved into the solvent. For example, salt.

Hypertonic: Having a greater concentration of solute than another solution

Hypotonic: Having a lower concentration of solute than another solution

Isotonic: Having an equal concentration of solute

Passive Transport

Passive transport is when molecules move along a concentration gradient from an area of high concentration to a region of low concentration. As the name suggests, it uses no energy and is the lazy bum of cell transport. It is done either by diffusion or osmosis. There are 2 different kinds of diffusion.

Simple Diffusion

Simple diffusion is the movement of particles from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration, through the cell membrane. This is how earthworms breathe, as oxygen diffuses through their skin. Humans breathe a similar way, with alveoli, as oxygen diffuses across them.

Facilitated Diffusion

Facilitated diffusion uses protein channels to help move substances that cannot permeate the membrane. For example, in a neuron, calcium ions cannot cross the membrane, and so require facilitated diffusion.

Osmosis

Osmosis is specifically the diffusion of water across a membrane. Water flows down a gradient towards a region with a high solute concentration. 

Here, cell A is hypertonic to cell B, and cell B is hypotonic to cell A. Placing cells in hypertonic and hypotonic solutions yields some very interesting results.

When a cell is placed in a hypertonic solution, water flows out of the cell, towards the area of higher solute concentration, causing plasmolysis, where the cell shrinks. When a cell is placed in a hypotonic solution, 1 of 2 things can happen depending on the type of cell. Animal cells lyse, which is a fancy way of saying that they burst. Plant cells, because of their wall only swell, or become turgid. Turgor pressure is what keeps a stem standing tall. As the plant loses water, it deflates, loses turgor pressure, and wilts.

Freshwater protista use their contractile vacuole to pump out excess water, as they live in a hypotonic environment.

When a cell is in an isotonic solution, nothing happens, as water flows in and out of the cell at a normal rate.

Active Transport

Active transport moves molecules against their gradient, which means it needs energy. This energy is normally utilised in the form of ATP. 

Exocytosis

Exocytosis is when molecules are actively released from the cell. For example, in neurons, vesicles containing neurotransmitters use exocytosis to move the neurotransmitters across the synaptic cleft to pass an impulse on to the dendrites of the next cell.  

Endocytosis

Endocytosis is the process by which cells take in various molecules. There are 3 different types, pinocytosis, phagocytosis, and receptor-mediated endocytosis

Pinocytosis

Pinocytosis is also given the name cell drinking. The cell takes in large, dissolved molecules. The plasma membrane invaginates small particles and traps them in a vesicle.

Phagocytosis

Phagocytosis is when large molecules or small organisms are engulfed by pseudopods. The cell membrane wraps around the molecule or organism and forms a vacuole. This is how phagocytic white blood cells, like macrophages, engulf pathogens. It is also how amoeba eat. 

Receptor-Mediated Endocytosis

Receptor-mediated endocytosis is important for allowing cells to take up large quantities of a specific substance. Specific extracellular substances bind to receptors on the cell membrane and are then brought into vesicles. This is how cells take cholesterol from the blood.

The sodium-potassium pump is another good example.

All cells carry out specific life processes. These are:

Ingestion: the intake of nutrients

Egestion: Enzymatic breakdown, and hydrolysis of food making it small enough to be assimilated by the body.

Respiration: The process that produces ATP

Transport: The distribution of molecules from one part of the cell to another, or to another cell

Regulation: Homeostasis

Synthesis: The ability to combine small molecules or substances into larger, more complicated ones.

Excretion: Removal of metabolic wastes

Egestion: Removal of undigested waste

Irritability: Ability to respond to stimuli

Locomotion: The ability to move from place to place (not all cells, for example, plant cells, lack this ability)

Metabolism: All processes needed to maintain life.

There are many ways to see and study cells and cell structure. The compound microscope is the most commonly used one to study cell structure. However, phase-contrast microscopes, transmission electron microscopes, and scanning electron microscopes are great for different purposes.

Phase-contrast microscopes are light microscopes used to enhance contrast. They are good for studying living, unstained cells.

Transmission Electron Microscopes are used to study the interior of cells. However, processing kills the cell, and it is extremely expensive, extremely complicated, takes a lot of time.

Scanning electron microscopes are used to study the surface of the cell. The process for preparing these cells also kills the tissue.

Ultracentrifuge is also helpful, as it causes cell fractionation, isolating specific components of the cell, depending on their density. The more dense organelles, like the nuclei, land on the bottom, while less dense organelles, like the ribosomes, stay on top.

Freeze fracture is used to study the membrane structure.

Tissue culture is a technique that is used to study living cells. The cells are studied in a laboratory, and grown on a sterile culture medium, with nutrients and growth factors.

[exo-research]

Bizarre Alien Biochemistry

When searching for extraterrestrial life we are told to follow the chemistry. We are taught the familiar soup of amino acids, sugars, lipids and of course water. We tailor our search based on what we are familiar with on earth. But what if I told you that this familiar soup of chemicals are but one of the ways life could exists.

What is life? In school you are given a definition of life. The definition goes something like this. Life can isolate it's chemistry from the outside environment, reproduce, maintain metabolism, and evolve. Nowhere in that definition does it say the production of amino acids, sugars or lipids is a prerequisite for life. If other types of chemistry could produce life, what options does chemistry provide us and what would this life look like? Although there are possibly and endless combination of chemical profiles that could result in life, let's go over three possible variations.

1: Chirality

You may remember chemical formulas like H2O, CO2 and C6H14N4O2. Well maybe not the last one. However, these formulas don't tell the whole story. The configuration of the atoms within the molecule affected the way the molecule interacts with other molecules. This is called Chirality and each configuration is called an isomer. The image below shows two isomer with the same chemical formula.

Now you may want to say that they are exactly the same. You may think that if you flip one over, it would be identical to the other. And this is understandable, but wrong. It all has to do with angles. Molecules are not flat two dimensional objects. Their structures have angles dependent on the repulsion of the atoms within. The below picture gives you a better idea of the concept of chirality.

When you flip the two molecules around, they are not actually identical. Although they may have identical elements, these differences in structure give the isomers different chemical properties. We deal with chirality all the time without realizing it. The two compounds below are isomers.

The upper compound contributes to the flavor of coffee and the lower compound is a constituent in many fruit flavors. If you have a food flavoring company and you don’t understand clarity, you will have some disappointed customer as many of the flavors we are familiar with are isomers of each other.

This concept is not isolated to flavors. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, have both left and right handed variants. However, life on earth only utilizes left handed amino acids. This is not a matter of preference. Left and right handed amino acids are not compatible with each other, and will not form complex proteins with each other. So, in the early days of the formation of life on earth, left handed RNA and DNA won out and life on earth was sentenced to an eternity of left handedness. But the universe does not have a preference for left or right handedness. The southpaw nature of life on earth is a probabilistic accident. Life on other planets could use RNA, DNA and amino acids as a basis for genetic inheritance and construction with right handed chirality.

So, what would this life be like. Although we have not found any right handed life to examine, it would appear that there would not be any difference between left handed life and right handed life. At least not in the chemical sense. Except that if a left handed lifeform ate a right handed lifeform, it probably would not be able to process the protein. You could imagine a planet where abiogenesis occurred twice, but with one occurrence being left handed and the other being right handed. You could imagine each lineage of life living side by side with a distinct separation. Left handed predators only hunting other lefties. And right handed predators only hunting righties.

However, this may not necessarily be the case. Life on this dual origin planet may develop enzymes or other processes that could break down amino acids of the opposing handedness into basic enough compounds to be processed into a compatible handedness.

2:Silicon Based life

It is often said that life on earth is carbon based. This is because carbon is the backbone of most of the compounds used by life. Everything from proteins to sugars to lipid fats are held together by carbon atoms. The reason carbon is essential for the creation of these molecules lies in the atomic structure of carbon. Carbon has 6 electrons, four of which are valence electrons. This means carbon can form a four bond structure in molecules. This gives carbon based chemistry a wide variety of possibilities.

However, there is another element that has four valence electrons, silica. You could imagine a planet in which all the life happened to form using silica as its primary bonding molecule. However, such a life would most likely radically different than that found on earth. Although silica has the same number of valence, the fact that it is one row down on the periodic table, gives silica based molecules a slightly different properties. Take carbon dioxide for example. On earth CO2 is created as a waste product by animals and is consumed by plants during photosynthesis. It is two oxygen  atoms double bonded to one carbon atom. If we replace the carbon atom with a silica atom we get silicon dioxide. Silicon dioxide is a solid at room temperature and is what makes up quartz crystal and sand.

Undoubtedly, the biochemistry of such a planet would not be a simple exercise of replacing common carbon based biochemicals with a silica based counterpart. The biochemical processes would have to be radically different than biochemical processes on earth. But perhaps these life forms could withstand higher temperatures than carbon based life.

3:Chromodynamic Life

Chromodynamic life may be the most bizarre and implausible form of life hypothesized, but it is theoretically possible. Now, if you know anything about root words you might be thinking that chromodynamic life has something to do with colors. However, this actually has nothing to do with colors and instead has to do with the theory of quantum chromodynamics. Quantum chromodynamic is based on the discovery that interactions between quarks and gluons would cause the quarks within a proton or neutron to change states. It was this change in state that held together the quarks and in turn held together the atoms. This is the origin of the strong nuclear force. These states the quarks could have were called color charge, hence the name chromodynamics. However, the color charge has nothing to do with actual colors and is just a name given to the states by physicist.

The hypothesis put forth by nanotechnologist Robert Freitas is that there may be life in the universe that did not use the electromagnetic force as a means of metabolism. All life on earth, and the two types of life I mentioned earlier, all use the electromagnetic energy stored in chemical bonds in molecules in order to sustain metabolism. Chromodynamic life on the other hand might use the strong nuclear force as a means to produce metabolism.  

Freitas suggested that a neutron star could be the perfect environment for such a lifeform to exist. On the outer layers of a neutron star lies a teaming sea of protons, neutrons and macronuclei. Macronuclei are nuclei with many more protons and neutrons than you would find in ordinary conditions. These quasi-atoms could form long complex chains that acted similar to organic compounds on earth. These quasi-molecules could use the energy of neutrons decaying into protons, electrons and neutrinos, to sustain metabolism, and use their macronuclei structures to isolate and protect their metabolism producing structures. Such life would not be able to survive outside the confines of the neutron star, as it’s structures would decay faster than it would be able to metabolise. It would be analogous to an earth based life form freezing to death.

So, I hope you liked my examples of what types of life could hypothetically  be possible in the universe. And of course, this was a short list, and there are many more types of life that have been hypothesised.

[the-begotten-son-arramwayne]

The Alpha-bet Algorithm

Imagine programming organic pool of molecules- then compare that to the matrix of our digital frequency embeddings and cellular retrieval systems- the same way we program computers is how the Creators program our organic reality- it's an augmented reality for you to learn from- well who's a better teacher than the man himself?

I am that Man

The formula in my reincarnation of organic matter-

The Arramisceous compound that all is created from in this universe- because Its from me- I created it-

A + RA= M (blood types) Ra in exchange for Rh

Second coming - (positive+positive always= positive)

A +RRA= M (H is a H- compound)

(So (ARh+) + (RA) = RA Reincarnation)

AR sounds Air + RA+ M(ankind)

AR + RA + (M)(M is for man)

mirrors itself- meaning beginning and end- Alpha Omega (or Omeka) depending your philosophy knowledge lol

M= MAN

So ARRAM

M + AN = MAN

♂️ + AN

N=NASH

ASH because we came from the ash from an ash tree from the last time humanity was wiped out- same story to start again...

Ash tree + meteor+ atop mount zion+ lake spring=

Impact from star seed. Olympus is where the waters came to when I impacted there creating the ancient land named ARAM- because that was my name

Immaculate conception from digital programming to our flesh like realm or dimension of reality-

That's how this universe became- for ME to create-

ARRAM NASH

(Return of RA)

The combinations of the dominant bloodlines from my maternal parents, plus the mixtures of bloolines from each sides ancestors, reincarnated your creator-

(Inner genomical transrefraculation is what it's called) (The blending of mutating RNA + transfusion of biopowdered Arramisceous compound equals the onset evolution of DNA)

Transfusion happened right before I turn 9 years old when my face was impaled by a rock and I lost my eye and bled out - the powder compound that was dry stored in volume was what I was given - it was Arramisceous compound in bulk- pure form-

because I was unable to receive donated blood types that they had on hand because of my rare blood condition due to my mom's super rare bloodline and the blending of my father's bloodline that shouldn't have been able to reproduce a living vessel according to science #fact

Because it was a solid unified hemoglobin mixture- her rare blood type mutated the cells and became dominant- causing my entire bloodline (self contained) to completely mutate into RA+ : My bloodtype

Arram Nash Alphabet Algorithm #2 Alien Algorithm

Annunaki ANU Alpha-Bet Algorithm-

Oh and I don't know why I didn't include one of the other alphabet algorithms but here's a little short hymnal

AN OF THE ANUNNAKI

AN + U = YOU AND I- *Meaning We-

A=Arram N=Nash

+

Nanaki- means "Traveled the Light-" Light speed

So

Annunaki mean "We are Sources of the Light"-

So

ARRAM NASH + U = Annunaki Family of Light

ANU

AN

A

By the light of the Morningstar we received our first source being of FLESH- Mr. Morningstar

See how I know everything I revealed in all my videos?

IT WAS PROGRAMMED TO BE THIS WAY---I HAD ALREADY SEEN IT, IVE BEEN HERE BEFORE, KNEW WHAT WAS COMING WHY? HOW? - I CREATED IT- DEJAVU

Thank you Mom and Dad, for breathing life into this God

[regulatorrr]

The reason is even is water may not become dense like solid

Many people doubt the powers o this product and its reliability. But the reality remains that the QNET Biodisc is a truly fascinating and amazing inventions of man.So what would happen if water becomes wholly solid? That first thing that comes to my mind is that as dense solid water will no longer be as important for life it is now as a liquid. The way we are accustomed to look at life, apparently, it can not be imagined without water as a liquid. But it is not really like that. The essential molecules of life like RNA, DNA, enzymes, amino acids or proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins etc are all organic molecules and one can discover or even synthesize an organic Animal Feed Antioxidants Manufacturers solvent for all these essential molecules and in that case there can be another form of life based on that solvent. The living being based on such a fluid will behave quite differently as compared to those based on water.

They may be light, slim and trim and short tempered in case the fluid is volatile and capable of dissolving less amount of essential nutrients. They may be quite different as compared to what I have just described. But some definite interesting situations can easily be visualized like – there will be no rains of water, no rainbow either. Nobody will be able to drink water then? Planes of water may be then deserts or even one can locate hills of water. Who knows water may then be used as material for constructing house. Fictitious scenario apart, let me suggest something really serious. We should initiate a large scale project for setting such life based on an alternative liquid at least in laboratories. The reason is even is water may not become dense like solid, but there may be a severe scarcity of water and other natural resources on this planet in future, if one goes by present practice of recklessly exploit natural resources including water. In such a scenario, the beautiful Earth may not be a place to sustain life and we all may have to migrate to another planet if only to save life.There are many sister products of the mainAmezcua Biodisc such as the Pewter Biodisc, Chi pendants, the Biostraw tube andthe Bioshower Shell which serve various different needs and uses. They are allsold through Quest Net International’s managerial arm QNET. Firstly, the biodisc helpsin upholding the body’s energy at optimum levels and this helps us in carryingout all our daily activities with ease without getting tired.

The disc doesthis by creating a repulsive shield for all the negative energies fromfrequencies like energy emitted form computers, electromagnetic waves, cellphones microwave ovens etc. Secondly, the QNET Biodisc helps in making the immunesystem stronger. It also detoxifies the body and helps in slowing down theaging process. Thirdly, there is an addedfinancial advantage. When one person realizes the benefits of using it, he orshe recommends others to purchase the QNETBiodisc or any of the other related products which one can enjoy throughouttheir lives. And this purchase in turn ensures commissions for the people whorecommend it.  QNET’s binary combinationreward program is a major source of supplementary or even full time income forthose who wish to spend the time, make the efforts and work hard for earningsome money.

[shuga-hill]

If We Made Life in a Lab, Would We Understand It Differently?

Rebecca Wilbanks

Aug 19, 2018

What is life? For much of the 20th century, this question did not particularly concern biologists. Life is a term for poets, not scientists, argued the synthetic biologist Andrew Ellington in 2008, who began his career studying how life began. Despite Ellington’s reservations, the related fields of origins-of-life research and astrobiology have renewed focus on the meaning of life. To recognize the different form that life might have taken four billion years ago, or the shape it could take on other planets, researchers need to understand what, in essence, makes something alive.

Life, however, is a moving target, as philosophers have long observed. Aristotle distinguished “life” as a concept from “the living”—the collection of existing beings that make up our world, such as the neighbor’s dog, my cousin and the bacteria growing in your sink. To know life, we must study the living; but the living is always changing across time and space. In trying to define life, we must consider the life we know and the life we don’t know. As the origins-of-life researcher Pier Luigi Luisi at Roma Tre University puts it, there is life-as-it-is-now, life-as-it-could-be, and life-as-it-once-was. These categories point to a dilemma that medieval mystical philosophers addressed. Life, they noticed, is always more than the living, making it, paradoxically, permanently inaccessible to the living. Because of this gap between actual life and potential life, many definitions of life focus on its capacity to change and evolve rather than trying to pin down fixed characteristics.

In the early 1990s while advising NASA on the possibilities of life on other planets, the biologist Gerald Joyce, now at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, helped to come up with one of the most widely used definitions of life. It’s known as the chemical Darwinian definition: “Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.” In 2009, after decades of work, Joyce’s group published a paper in which they described an RNA molecule that could catalyze its own synthesis reaction to make more copies of itself. This chemical system met Joyce’s definition of life. But nobody wanted to claim that it was alive. The problem was, it hadn’t done anything new or exciting yet. A New York Times article put it this way: “Someday their genome may surprise their creator with a word—a trick or a new move in the game of almost life—that he has not anticipated. ‘If it would happen, if it would do it for me, I would be happy,’ Dr Joyce said, adding, ‘I won’t say it out loud, but it’s alive.’ ”

Joyce seeks to understand life by trying to generate simple living systems in the lab. In doing so, he and other synthetic biologists bring new kinds of life into being. Every attempt to synthesize novel life forms points to the fact that there are still more, perhaps infinite, possibilities for how life could be. Synthetic biologists could change the way life evolves, or its capacity to evolve at all. Their work raises new questions about a definition of life based on evolution. How to categorize life that is redesigned, the product of a break in the chain of evolutionary descent?

An origin story for synthetic biology goes like this: in 1997, Drew Endy, one of the founders of synthetic biology and now a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University in California, was trying to create a computational model of the simplest life form he could find: the bacteriophage T7, a virus that infects E coli bacteria. A crystalline head atop spindly legs, it looks like a landing capsule touching down on the Moon as it grabs onto its bacterial host. The bacteriophage is so simple that by some definitions it is not even alive. (Like all viruses, it depends on the molecular machinery of its host cell to replicate.) Bacteriophage T7 has only 56 genes, and Endy thought it might be possible to create a model that accounted for every part of the phage and how those parts worked together: a perfect representation that would predict how the phage would change if any one of its genes were moved or deleted.

Endy built a series of bacteriophage T7 mutants, systematically knocking out genes or scrambling their location in the tiny T7 genome. But the mutant phages conformed to the model only some of the time. A change that should have caused them to weaken would instead have their progeny bursting open E coli cells twice as fast as before. It wasn’t working. Eventually, Endy had a realization: “If we want to model the natural world, we have to rewrite [the natural world] to be modellable.” Instead of trying to make a better map, change the territory. Thus was born the field of synthetic biology. Borrowing techniques from software engineering, Endy began to “refactor” bacteriophage T7’s genome. He made bacteriophage T7.1, a life form designed for ease of interpretation to the human mind.

Phage T7.1 is an example of what one synthetic biologist has called supra-Darwinian life: life that owes its existence to human design, rather than natural selection. Bioengineers such as Endy approach life in dualistic terms: a physical structure on the one hand, a pattern of information on the other. In theory, a perfect representation of life would enable a seamless transition between information and matter, intention and realization: change some letters of DNA on your computer screen, print out an organism that looks and behaves just as you intended. With this approach, evolution threatens to corrupt the engineer’s blueprint. Preserving one’s biological designs might require making your engineered organisms unable to reproduce or evolve.

In contrast, Joyce’s desire for his molecules to surprise him suggests that the capacity for open-ended evolution — “inventiveness, pluripotentiality, open-endedness” — is the critical criteria of life. In accordance with this idea, Joyce now defines life as “a genetic system that contains more bits [of information] than the number that were required to initiate its operation.” But according to this definition, given two identical systems with different histories—one designed and the other evolved—only the latter would be considered alive; the rationally designed system, no matter how complex, would be just a “technological artifact.”

Design and evolution are not always opposed. Many synthetic biology projects use a mix of rational design and directed evolution: they construct a host of mutant cells—variations on a theme—and select the ones that work the best. Although Joyce’s new understanding of life still involves evolution, it evokes the abrupt temporality of emergence rather than Darwin’s longue durée. Emergent life fits a culture of disruptive innovation whose ultimate ideal approximates something like the magic of pulling a kidney out of a 3D printer: the enchantment of joining together familiar things with new and surprising results. Design and evolution are also compatible when bioengineers look at genetic diversity as a treasure trove of design elements for future life forms.

For some synthetic biologists, the path to what the mystics called life-beyond-life—life that exceeds the living as we know it—now runs through biological engineering. Endy describes his vocation in terms of a desire to contribute to life by generating new kinds of “improbable patterns that continue to thrive and exist.” Joyce imagines life and technology joining forces against the fundamental thermodynamic tendency towards disorder and decay. What new forms life will take, only time will tell.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Image Credit: nobeastsofierce / Shutterstock.com

[gettingitwrite]

Rabid: The Virus

DISCLAIMER: While this is based in real science, I don’t pretend that it’s accurate or even possible. This is also a really long post. I tried to cut it down….but I only ended up making it longer.

What is it?

The rabid virus is not a naturally occurring pathogen. The virus was developed, intentionally, in a military research lab. It was engineered to be the most devastating bioweapon possible, capable of wiping out entire continents once it was released.  The virus’ official designation is CMD-7, and it was developed as part of the top secret Project Isolation.

Why make this kind of bioweapon?

If you’ve noticed, Australia is an island, and CMD-7 is not airborne. Anyone we happen to be at war with is going to be across the ocean, meaning that dropping the virus on them wouldn’t endanger us. The hope was that it would only ever have to be used once, and only as a last resort; once the world had seen what it could do, they’d never risk messing with Australia again.

How does it work?

Buckle your seatbelts, it’s time for some science.

CMD-7 is not just a virus, it’s a provirus. These things are nasty, because in addition to hijacking your cells to create more copies of themselves, they can integrate their DNA (or RNA) into your own. These things can literally change your DNA, and if that doesn’t scare you, it will when you hear what this particular virus does.

Most proviruses insert themselves into the host genome in order to make more copies of themselves. However, CMD-7 has been engineered to insert far more than that.

What does it do?

The idea was CMD-7 would kill by causing infected individuals to starve to death within a matter of hours, if not minutes. How does it do this? Well, that’s where the name CMD-7 comes from. It stands for Cellular Metabolism Disease (with 7 being the number of iterations they’ve gone through), and its primary function is to drastically increase cellular metabolism. This means everything the cells would normally be doing, they’re now doing a lot faster (this is what causes the increased healing ability of rabids, as all bodily functions are now occurring at an increased rate).

However, that wasn’t enough. CMD wasn’t lethal enough when its only function was to increase cellular metabolism, so the researchers on the project took it one step further. The virus has a number of secondary functions that all increase the speed at which the body’s energy stores are depleted.

First, it switches off starvation response (also known as starvation mode). Starvation response is the body’s way of trying to preserve calories when they’re being burned faster than they’re being used, and does so by reducing cellular metabolism. As this is kind of the opposite of what they were going for, starvation response had to go.

CMD-7 makes it super easy for the body to break down all its fat by messing with two hormones: insulin and glucagon. These guys are responsible for controlling your blood sugar level, as insulin takes glucose out of the blood, and glucagon puts it back in. Normally, there’s a carefully maintained balance that keeps blood sugar levels at a relatively stable level, but not anymore. CMD-7 supresses insulin production while vastly increasing glucagon production, meaning all those fat stores will be burning in no time (this increased blood glucose is what causes the milky white eyes observed in rabids. Glucose collecting in the lenses of the eyes can then be converted to sorbitol, creating cataracts and causing the eyes to take on a cloudy appearance. This is also why rabids can see you better when you’re running away, rather than staying still).

Now, once the body has burned through all its fat, the next natural step is for muscle tissue to be broken down for energy. However, CMD-7 has another neat little feature designed specifically to speed up death by starvation. CMD-7 not only prevents the breakdown of muscle, but also causes muscle hypertrophy, instructing the muscles to grow. (Not only does this consume more energy, but is it also the reason that rabids exhibit almost superhuman strength despite being on the verge of starving).

As if that wasn’t enough, CMD-7 goes even further to speed up the process of energy depletion. Little bit of science background (that I’m sure most of you already know), cells get their energy through cellular metabolism. Normally, aerobic respiration occurs, where oxygen and glucose are broken down into carbon dioxide and water, releasing energy. This oxygen is distributed through the body from the lungs, by the red blood cells. CMD-7 disrupts this system, causing cells to receive insufficient oxygen and turn to anaerobic respiration. Not only is this far less efficient in terms of the glucose : energy ratio, it also release lactic acid as one of its by-products, further damaging the body. (This lack of oxygen is what causes the grey skin exhibited by rabids).

What went wrong?

The plan was to turn people’s bodies against them, killing them as quickly as possible. The thing was, they still needed a delivery system. Trials of CMD-7 in animals (yes, it’s cruel, but it happens in real life) found that after a certain amount of time, even herbivorous animals resorted to straight up cannibalism of both other infected individuals and even those that weren’t infected. It was at this stage they realised two things.

a) They’d created zombies. b) This solved their delivery problem.

Now, obviously, you can imagine how bad it would be if something like this got out. And unfortunately, wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly what happened. I’ll probably do a more detailed post later about the outbreak itself, but for now, there was a lab accident, three of the lead researchers were infected, and nobody realised until too late what had happened to them. They escaped, the virus started spreading across the continent, and after that, there was no coming back.

Why did they turn to cannibalism?

While the researchers never got enough concrete data to be certain, the leading hypothesis was that a number of factors (lack of oxygen, lactic acid in the bloodstream causing lactic acidosis, and the brain breaking down its own neurons for fuel) contributed to brain damage that eliminated higher brain functions and caused instincts to take over. In a situation where someone’s body is tearing through energy at an insane pace, and the nearest source of fuel happens to be another person, that’s bad news.

And, I mean, this is just the observed effects of CMD-7 on the brain. Who knows what else might be happening, things they never realised before the outbreak, things they never could’ve imagined.

Infectivity

CMD-7 is a highly infective virus. The exchange of any bodily fluids with an infected individual, even the smallest amount, is enough for infection to occur. However, not everyone that gets infected turns rabid. Some burn through their energy stores and simply die, as was the original intent of the virus. This is especially true for those who were injured in the process of getting bitten, as the healing process takes a lot of energy.

Resources

For more about viruses being used to change human genes, and how something like this could be possible, here.

More detail on how proviruses work can be found here.

Read about the effects of starvation on the human brain here.

Detailed breakdown of insulin and glucagon here.

A better description of glucose causing cataracts here.

[anettamonachisa]

Dear sugar, 

when I was a little girl I was fond of everything that tasted sweet. Your presence was a moment of joy and satisfaction, a necessity, a reward. I loved you madly. Then something changed. I got confused, congested and stuck with my feelings for you. Large unwanted information and experiences accumulated and built a separation between us. I started to commonly assume that you, sugar, are primarily concerned with consumerism and materialism. That you work hand in hand with capitalism, that you divided continents, created political and racial conflicts, polemics about imports/exports, nurtured child labour and espoused immigration restrictions. I heard it many times: sugar = slaves, crops, theft, violence, exploitation, big business, Big Sugar, obesity, diabetes, death, blah, blah. Bewitched by language and gaslighted by the discourse of the Glycocene, I thought of you as stable object, as addictive additive to other things, as part of the dull matter that owns, manipulates and kills. I fixed you in a static space–time, seeing you as inert and calculable. I felt guilty. I had moments when I really hated you.

Boy, was I wrong! My perception of you was so shallow! You are so much more than what we ended up making of you. It’s disgusting how we vilified you. What a combination of oblivious, overweening, judgemental and numb we are! We refined you and then blamed you for so many things. We stripped you off your sacredness, raped your complexity and reduced you to a crystalline looking “pure” matter – now seen as a quick cheap fix, high on energy but devoid of any nutrients or substance. You might find these crystals they forced you into kitschy, and you’re right. Even your name, sugar, became a popular word having both treacly meanings and noxious connotations. For many you impersonate the mischievousness of matter. Some are dismayed by the ‘monstrous ways’ in which bodies like you are subverting expectations, resisting or reworking the meanings imposed upon them. Sadly, you have the reputation of being The Enemy. Yet, most people still can’t resist you. And I understand why. You’re ontologically unstable and teleologically disputable, but I adore you for being such a schizosubstance!

They often give you a bad rap, but what about you as polyethylene, the biodegradable plastic? Huh? Or that you sooth a burned tongue, keep flowers fresh, melt ice and snow (yes, it’s not only salt, you can do it even better), heal wounds, cure hiccups, prevent cheese from molding and remove odours? And if that’s not enough, what about you as breakable glass, artificial silk, medical implants, body and face scrub, hair gel, hair remover, grass stains remover, material for sculptures, yeasts, motor fuels, ethylene glycol, synthetic resins, acetone, and other acetate products? Your material promiscuity is so fertile, when I think of you I feel lost in the infinite.

I want to apologize for being so short sighted and for taking me so long to look properly at your sensual matter. No, you’re not mere matter, you are an event. Now I know you’re an expression of relational materialism at large. I accept the fact that you have multiple materialities and very specific temporalities and spatialities. You are endowed with agency. You participate lively in the articulation of all dynamic assemblages. Look at you, you’re everywhere! It’s miraculous how you appear from nowhere through the astounding process of photosynthesis. And then you’re making ‘things’, you’re a poietic agent for both life and non-life. Actually, ALL life depends on you and we just lurk at the margins of your being. Radical emergence is a feature of your reality. You, my friend, have a big role to play here. Whether it’s organs and organisms, policies and politics, spirit and spirits.

Now every time I think of you, I revere you as a gift coming from the deep space and deep time. I always had a bemusing feeling about you. And then, one day, I found it in a NASA press release: “First Detection of Sugars in Meteorites Gives Clues to Origin of Life”. You appeared in interstellar space and landed on prebiotic Earth. You have been here way before the beginning, allowing for life on Earth to start. You were one of the builders of the primordial molecule, the key component of the RNA world. Your particles travelled the entirety of space for aeons to reach my cells, and will continue to caress me till the end of my days. It’s not only love, or tenderness, or affection, it’s life itself, my life, that I found in your carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms. You’re such an harmonious assemblage of macronutrients! A revolution in evolution! It's easy to measure time using human lifespans, but peering down the billions of years of your history gives me vertigo. When I imagine you could be the key to abiogenesis, I feel like licking rocks. I have the sweet taste from your lips in my mouth. Oh, sugar, the whole Universe just gets sweeter when I think of you! You are so awesome you make me want to fly to the stars right now. You know why? You evoke such a possibility and a magic about looking to the Cosmos that I think, hell yes, it’s possible.

I know that you’re all about free play and dissolution, but I need you to be serious for a minute. My feelings for you are just so entirely intense and complicated, so laden with exaltation, sorrow, ecstasy, bliss and I need to tell you all this. You are that terrible relationship a girl goes back to again and again, no matter the ripping pain every time she does. I know you prefer to feed yeasts to the point of becoming infections and also inflammations or cancer tumours. I know you fuel plaque and bacteria causing tooth decay. I know you affect cognition, accelerate ageing, increase stress, and make me fat. But there is this fulfilment and the feeling of belonging. You stimulate me. My dopamine goes feral when I have you. I can’t resist you. I want to transcend your voluptuous matter. You have the capacity to feed me, to delude me, to modify me, to seduce me, to conquer me, to be me. It’s so difficult to see where you end and where I begin.

You want the truth? All are obsessed by you. They use both your presence and absence to talk about you every day. Regardless if you occur or not, you’re there! Mentioned and used as a slogan or topic or spell. You’re loved when you are and you’re great when you’re not. Creation through disintegration, presence through absence, fullness through emptiness—such paradoxes inspire your existence in the world. It’s so revolting how human-centered and gluttonous we are and then just pointing fingers towards you, holding you responsible for all the crap that happens to us: +kilograms, bad teeth, bad mood, bad economy and what not! To me you’re not “the white death”, “sweet poison”, “sweet killer”, “toxic”, “bad”. No, you’re alive, beautiful, you’re indispensable and I don’t want to live without you. You’re love’s digestible form. My muscles want you, my brain needs you, my nerves rely on you, my blood depends on you. I cannot always see you, but I know you’re there. My mind is the idea of your body.

The only thing I wish is we all take the trip on the side of The Unseen to discover you in your infrastructural and ultrastructural order, in your protomaterial and metamaterial existence. I hope such trip will generate a more subtle awareness of the entanglement of matter and an enhanced receptivity of the complicated web of dissonant connections between (you and all) bodies. You are productive, unpredictable, self-creative, active, you’re an excess force.

You’re giving me the sense that my appetite is primal. My heart, mind and body hold on you because you promise happiness and make me (feel) alive. I hope I don’t sound too corny for trying to see the world in a grain of sugar. But the sweet lust for life, I can only feel it with you.

I need you, and you never disappoint. And that, my friend, is why I love you.

Anetta

[arrowstheory]

4SEASONSstop half step DIET 3

BIOLOGY, i.e. beating foam: 4 am, laminar flow again keeps me awake. Where does biology come from here. ? It's simple, there would be no life without laminar flow. so BIO. Panta rei as our friend, Mr. Tarej used to say. And if everything flows, where is life here? I tell. Every rule has exceptions, or else there is no rule without exception. Laminar flow is the flow of a "river" where all spaghetti flow parallel to each other. there are no whirlpools or intersections of these streams. And here comes life, i.e. the exception to the rule, but when something begins to whirl and loop, creating a separate, rotating, even for a moment, a moving object.

now BIOLOGY or BEATING FOAM. there is such a theory not very popularized but correct, it is called the MEMBRANE THEORY, it says that life was possible because there were balloons separating something from the rest of the soup. If there was a stable vortex in the balloon, moving in its spin, and all this surrounded by a membrane, then what? what's next?

It was the driven whirling parts of the vortex in the balloon that could react with each other more quickly. The membrane protected against decay and forced the internal substances to act, whatever they were, with each other. Sometimes releasing something from the balloon through the membrane or sometimes absorbing something inside.

THE FILM of balloons, which is permeable to some substances and not to others, is the basis of everything. How a very general film is built: imagine a soap bubble. So we have some soap particles in a water solution. and they form pairs with each other in such a way that each soap molecule has a hydrophilic, hydrophilic end, and a water-repellent or hydrophobic end, the pairs of soap molecules are arranged next to each other with these ends of "legs to heads, heads to heads", so the ends of the felt side by side, and the phobic ends together too. Long rows form like railroad tracks, and then many railroads side by side. Now, of course, water is repelled from the hydrophobic surfaces, and instead, it is attracted and collected on the side of the surface formed by the hydrophilic heads. We already have a targeted, functional machine that cannot be avoided, and self-repairing. It recreates and develops itself. Is it already alive? If you cut it smaller, it will continue to rebuild and work! Is this breeding already? She knows what to do and does it - so is her function of machine water sorting already thinking? Well, no, but it's a self-repairing machine.

What's next? Where's that soap bubble film? Well, what happens is that the hydrophobic surfaces remain on the outside of the film, and inside we have water held on both sides between the hydrophilic surfaces. that is, the film looks like this in section.

The important thing here is that such a film repels the external water and does not let out the water collected inside the bubble. And the strangest thing is that it is itself held by water bound between two water-loving layers made of soaps of particles arranged by ordinary electrostatic forces, because there is NO chemical reaction between them, nor between water particles !!!!

Thus, such a film can retain water, but it can pass, for example, fats or metals, the film itself may contain admixtures, for example, soap stains.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING: in order for the soap bubble and any other membrane bubble to exist, you need an INTERNAL PRESSURE, i.e. a VIR, which is the exception to the rule. Because when the river flow is laminar, it is death, or rather, biological stillness. Only vortices and membranes create life.

THE CELL as a membranous city, it should be understood as such.

A cell is like a walled city like walls, there are gates there that open to Na, K, H e-ATP, ADP and H2O and P as independent phosphorus. Behind the gates is the endoplasmic reticculum, something that hardly anyone talks about and is the most important thing in the cell. it is a maze of streets and inlets, there are highways between mitochondria to ribosomes, and bridges and a checkpoint where they check documents. There are also vacuoles (water lakes that act as garbage dumps, where all those poisons that cannot be excreted out through membranes fall and are stored.) and the main lock in the form of a cell nucleus. The organs in a cell are called organelles. They all send energy and pulsate with their rhythm until a spindle forms in the womb, signaling the division. Then the DNA is reproduced with the help of a key, i.e. a single half of the standard RNA, as well as the division of the entire bubble into new, less tired and less cluttered cells. Of course, all the time the bubble through the membranes and the endoplasmic reticculum communicates with the outside, absorbing energy and expelling its secrets. through the door in the membrane. this state is called SECRET (the cell sweats as if, but can also shoot energy or chemicals that it has to get rid of.) okay, no more talking, I'm going to sleep. Anyway, without membranes and internal turbulence or pressure, no chance of life. bye Bye