What is a Virus? | Breakthrough

less than 1m read

·Nov 11, 2024

Virus is actually just genetic material encased in an envelope, and it actually needs a host like me or you in order for it to infect and continue to produce more copies of itself. So what happens is a virus infects me, let's say, and my immune system starts trying to control that virus. Well, the virus evolves and mutates and changes its genetic material over time to try to outrun my immune system.

So, it's a constant battle between the host and the virus, and basically, they're evolving together, they're co-evolving. Ebola is a filovirus, part of a rare family of viruses transmitted by direct contact with bodily fluids, often blood. By contrast, influenza spreads through droplets sneezed or coughed into the air, which makes it easier to catch.

But unlike most strains of flu, filoviruses kill large percentages of the people they infect, up to 90%. This is why this particular lab may be the most dangerous place on earth; it's dedicated exclusively to testing live samples of Ebola. If just a speck of Ebola virus enters your bloodstream, it can quickly make billions of copies of itself and rip you apart from the inside—a hideous and painful way to die.

Big Trophy Hunting | Explorer

Finding specific antiderivatives: exponential function | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

View All

Warren Buffett's Stark Warning About 'AI Stocks'

We let a genie out of a bottle when we develop nuclear weapons, and AI is somewhat similar. All right team, we’ve got a lot more to talk about. As you guys would have seen in my last video, I am here in Omaha covering the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder m…

Can You Perceive Acceleration?

Have you ever considered how your eye scans across a landscape? I think most people assume that, like a video camera, it pans smoothly across the scene. But I don’t actually think that’s what happens. In truth, I think the eye jumps from image to image as…

Is Political Difference Biological? | StarTalk

And so there’s a recent book called “Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences.” It was like, yeah, let’s get some science! It’s like, roll some science into this conversation! And it suggests that political views may …

The early Temperance movement - part 2

Hey, it’s Becca, and this is Temperance Part Two. Um, in this video, I’ll be talking more about how exactly, over the course of the 1830s until mostly the 1860s, the temperance movement took root in America and how it became this national phenomenon. So,…

The Fermi Paradox: Where are all the Aliens?

Liftoff from a tropical rainforest to the Edge of Time itself. James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the Universe. On December 25th, 2021, NASA launched the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope. Hubble has pro…

Normal conditions for sampling distributions of sample proportions | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

What we’re going to do in this video is think about under which conditions the sampling distribution of the sample proportions in which situations does it look roughly normal and under which situations does it look skewed right. So, it doesn’t look someth…

What is a Virus? | Breakthrough

More Articles