I try to do these every Monday, but it never happens. Anyways, it's been a long time from the last one. I can remember what it was about. Nintendo, I think. Hmm. Taken from the May 2010 issue of 'Discover Magazine', here's a tribute to the little buggers that usually kills us. And, sometimes helps us live better lives...

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20 Things You Didn't Know....About Viruses

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1 Viruses are not alive: They do not have cells, they cannot turn food into energy, and without a host they are just inert packets of chemicals.

2 Viruses are not exactly dead, either: They have genes, they reproduce, and they evolve through natural selection.

3 Scientists have been debating this issue since 1892, when Dmitry Ivanovsky, a Russian microbiologist, reported that an infection in tobacco plants spreads via something smaller than a bacterium. That something, now called the tobacco mosaic virus, is what's in the picture above. (magnified and colorized).

4 Score one for Team Nonliving: After American biochemist Wendell Stanley purified the tobacco mosaic virus into needlelike crystals of protein, he won a 1946 Nobel Prize—awarded in chemistry, not medicine.

5 Score one for Team Living: Some viruses sneak DNA into a bacterium through its, um, sex appendage, a long tube known as a pilus. If that’s not life, what is?

6 Virus comes from the Latin word for “poison” or “slimy liquid,” an apt descriptor for the bug that causes flu and the common cold.

7 In 1992 scientists tracking a pneumonia outbreak in England found a massive new kind of virus lurking within an amoeba inside a cooling tower. It was so large and complex, they initially assumed it was a bacterium.

8 That über-virus is now called Mimivirus, so named because it mimics bacteria and because French biologist Didier Raoult, who helped sequence its genome, fondly recalled his father telling the story of “Mimi the Amoeba.”

9 Mimivirus contains more than 900 genes, which encode proteins that all other viruses manage to do without. Its genome is twice as big as that of any other known virus and bigger than that of many bacteria.

10 Mamavirus, closely related to Mimivirus but even bigger, also turned up inside an amoeba in a Paris cooling tower. (Maybe somebody should clean those towers.)

11 Mamavirus is so big that it has its own dependent, a satellite virus named Sputnik.

12 Amoebas turn out to be great places to seek out new viruses. They like to swallow big things and so serve as a kind of mixing bowl where viruses and bacteria can swap genes.

13 Viruses are already known to infect animals, plants, fungi, protozoa, archaea, and bacteria. Sputnik and Mamavirus suggest that they can infect other viruses, too.

14 In fact, scratch the whole concept of “us versus them.” Half of all human DNA originally came from viruses, which infected and embedded themselves in our ancestors’ egg and sperm cells.

15 Most of those embedded viruses are now extinct, but in 2005 French researchers applied for permission to resurrect one of them. Some scientists objected, saying the resurrected virus could go on a rampage; the research ministry approved the project.

16 Apocalypse Not: The virus, dubbed Phoenix, was a dud.

17 Then again, other viral relics in our genomes may play a role in autoimmune diseases and certain cancers.

18 Some viral proteins do good. They may have kept your mother’s immune system from attacking you in utero, for instance.

19 A virus called HTLV, which has coevolved with humans for thousands of years, is being used to uncover prehistoric migration patterns. Its modern distribution suggests that Japanese sailors were the first people to reach the Americas, millennia before Siberians wandered across the Bering Strait.

20 We are family: Scientists suspect that a large DNA-based virus took up residence inside a bacterial cell more than a billion years ago to create the first cell nucleus. If so, then we are all descended from viruses.

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How's that for ya? Don't forget you can add comments and other facts or ask questions here. You'll learn more by doing so. I encourage it.

Weird, so viruses arn't alive, but not dead either. I learn new things every day.

Never knew that either before I read it myself.

Virus aren't technically a living thing they don't fall under the laws governing that, think of virus more along the lines of small preprogrammed robots.

They evolve and survive yes but only to an extent, they aren't intellegent, they cannot survive alone, and for the main part they do not need sustance. The only time it seems like they need sustance is when they destroy other cells, but that is to reproduce so its more like the virus recoding your own cells to be them.

Think of a virus like the borg almost lol.

No big scary mess from the hardcore christians on here?

lol when i first saw the thread i thought you where on about computer viruses lol!some really intresting stuff their not that i will remember any of it lol

Awesome! Thanks for the info.
Wow viruses are in their own category of semi-sub-living.
can't start to imagine how much more us humans don't know!

Bobbynibbles : You wouldn't see anything like that in general chat I'm afraid.

Saying something that is off-topic just to bash something is considered spam.

And this is why we have trouble with the flu every year.

OMG, when I first saw this thread, I thought it would be about viruses that affect your PC, lol
As long as the reall topic, I've heard about some of them, but I didn't know all these things.