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Sher, I can't recall the year but prions made the cover of Time magazine. Just trivia. P.
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shereads said:Mercy! Look at dem bunnies!
perdita said:Sher, I can't recall the year but prions made the cover of Time magazine. Just trivia. P.
Colleen Thomas said:ya like my bunnies? I'm kinda proud of em
*HUGS*
hope you truly are feeling better
-Colly

perdita said:Sher, that's my bunny, Petya. I got him for free, but today paid really big bucks to fix his teeth so that he could keep eating and stay alive. He's a sweetie but I've already started making him feel guilty for the vet bill. I guess that makes him a Christian rabbit (or maybe Jewish, not sure; though he is definitely Russian).
You had better believe that there are people out there advocating just that.Colleen Thomas said:... I have to admit there is a kind of poetic justice in the thought of men being hauled off to jail for jerking off, taking the back door or getting a blow job. ...
snooper said:You had better believe that there are people out there advocating just that.
shereads said:I don't have a clue what a prion is, and I'm too excited to look it up right now because you raised the "is a virus alive" issue. Wanna hijack the thread and talk about something really wierd and scary? (It's my thread, and I say let's hijack it!)
Let's talk viruses and whether they're alive and whether we're just here to give them something to graze on.
Topic: "The Demon in the Freezer," the story of smallpox and its close-but-no-cigar near-annihilation during the 1970s.
Tell me about prions, too.
Show off, please. I love this stuff.
Despite the images conjured forth, I want to know.rgraham666 said:Ask me about the zombie snails sometime.
snooper said:You had better believe that there are people out there advocating just that.
http://www.spies.com/~gus/ran/0012/antiporn/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/amenlover/
http://777.nventure.com/
rgraham666 said:rgraham666 pulls out a gun and demands, "Take this thread to Chicago!"
shereads replies, "It's already going to Chicago."
"Oh. In that case." rgraham666 sits back down in his seat, with his usual look of befuddlement.
Thanks, you've been a great audience. I'm here until Sunday.
___________________________
Ok, having gotten the silliness out of my system, I don't think viruses are alive. The only function of life they perform is reproduction. And that in a manner no other thing does, to my knowledge. They don't eat, shit or breathe, which takes 'em out of the living category, as far as I'm concerned.
A fascinating question is the evolution of viruses. Did they exist before life or did they evolve after life? And where did they come from? Did they evolve from some type of near-life or were they an already simple form of life that dumped some of life's function when they became unnecessary? I have no idea but it would be fun to find out.
As far as prions go, they are self-replicating proteins, that so far as I know, cause disease. I've never heard of a benevolent or neutral one. But I only know of three.
You are probably familiar with one, the one that causes BSE, Bovine Spongiform Encephalpathy in cows and vCJD, variant Creutzfeld Jakob Disease in humans. It's more commonly known as Mad Cow Disease.
There is another prion disease I know of, kuru or laughing sickness. It exists only in New Guinea, and is passed through cannibalism, most especially the eating of the brains and sexual organs of it's victims. Kuru was much more common amongst women and children as the brains and naughty bits were considered junk meat and the men got the 'choice cuts' while the women and children got the leftovers. The disease is called laughing sickness because the victims can't stop laughing.
They must have been eating one another for a long time for a disease to evolve to take advantage of it.
The third prion I know of causes scrapie in sheep.
You may regret asking me to show off sher. I'm one of the worst on the planet.
Ask me about the zombie snails sometime.
P.S. I've read Demon In The Freezer. I felt like a character in a Tom Clancy novel. "He didn't believe in Hell, but he had just seen the door to it cracked open."
A classic example of how intelligence and ethics are two completely different things.
perdita said:Despite the images conjured forth, I want to know.
perdita said:rg, thanks, that was very interesting. You're an interesting bloke.
Perdita
rgraham666 said:You are probably familiar with one, the one that causes BSE, Bovine Spongiform Encephalpathy in cows and vCJD, variant Creutzfeld Jakob Disease in humans. It's more commonly known as Mad Cow Disease.
There is another prion disease I know of, kuru or laughing sickness. It exists only in New Guinea, and is passed through cannibalism, most especially the eating of the brains and sexual organs of it's victims.
Kuru was much more common amongst women and children as the brains and naughty bits were considered junk meat
and the men got the 'choice cuts' while the women and children got the leftovers. The disease is called laughing sickness because the victims can't stop laughing.
They must have been eating one another for a long time for a disease to evolve to take advantage of it.
The third prion I know of causes scrapie in sheep.
You may regret asking me to show off sher. I'm one of the worst on the planet.
Ask me about the zombie snails sometime.
P.S. I've read Demon In The Freezer. I felt like a character in a Tom Clancy novel. "He didn't believe in Hell, but he had just seen the door to it cracked open."
rgraham666 said:Thank you ladies.
Always glad to be of service. Anything else I can do? (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more)
On another topic, I've just finished my first story for here on Lit.
I'm going to spend tomorrow hand polishing it (after I spend the afternoon cleaning up the detrius winter has left on my lawn) and probably submit it tomorrow night.
rgraham666 said:Does anyone know if there are any organisms that go through a viral stage of their life cycle?
rgraham666 said:There's a parasite that lives in a particular species of snail.
The parasite, as I recall, eats a great deal of the snail but leaves the brain and a lot of the musculature intact. The parasite takes over the brain of the snail and forces it to climb to the top of grass stems. Normally the snail stays under that canopy of the grass. The attenae of the snail also become swollen and colourful.
Being out in the open and colourful, attracts the attention of birds who come down and eat the snail. The parasites move through the bird's ailimentary tract until they are shit out the other end.
Then a snail wanders over the shit, some of the parasites infect the snail and the cycle starts all over.
I call them zombie snails because I've seen pictures. And the infected snails look like they were designed by George Romero. Eee-yuck!
perdita said:Sher, I can't recall the year but prions made the cover of Time magazine. Just trivia. P.
rgraham666 said:The parasites move through the bird's ailimentary tract until they are shit out the other end.
Then a snail wanders over the shit, some of the parasites infect the snail and the cycle starts all over.