I am so close to going full-on Howard Hughes...
Smithers, where are my Kleenex box slippers?
From Cosmos:
Viruses visible to the naked eye raise all sorts of interesting questions...
Ya think!!!!Two newly discovered species of giant virus both have the largest assembly of protein-coding genes ever found in the virus realm.Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Solar System, other little critters are doing Monty Python bits:
And the viruses themselves aren’t exactly tiny. A paper in the journal Nature Communications describes them as “optically visible” – a highly unusual characteristic.
The two new species, note a team of scientists led by Bernard La Scola from Aix-Marseille University, have a protein shell, known as a capsid, around 450 nanometres long and a cylindrical tail roughly the same length. The tail is the largest ever discovered.
By comparison, a polio virus is typically just 70 nanometres long. A smallpox virus tops out at about 300 nanometres.
The two closely related species were discovered in, or near, Brazil, one in a soda lake, and the other in sediments at the bottom of the deep ocean – both extreme environments known to support ancient lifeforms....MORE
Boffins: Red planet microbes may just be resting"No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay?"
