No One Here Gets Out Alive

A Storm Chaser’s Unforgiving View of the Sky

We are changing the face of the sky. And we are altering its mood; scientists hesitate to link specific storms to global warming, but it’s clear that, on the whole, climate change is making extreme-weather events more powerful and, perhaps, more common. When we look up, increasingly the face we see is ours. In the photographer Camille Seaman’s cloudscapes, it’s difficult to not also see humankind’s self-portrait: potent, defiant, unforgiving. Clouds always tell a true story, Ralph Abercromby said, and more than ever the story they tell is the story of ourselves. Where that story will take us is difficult to read.

Phoney by Ali Çetin

© Emmanuel Polanco 

Marcos Navarro, Illustrations.

I’m loving these eclectically colored, aquatic dream-themed illustrations from artist Marcos Navarro.

this is how they actually look

And then there’s viroids, which are somewhat virus-like but they have no protein capsid coating. Just infectious nucleic acid getting into cells and getting replicated. 

- some viruses “breathe” - all their little pieces wiggle around differently, and how much they wiggle (and as a consequence, expose vulnerable bits to the outside world) sometimes makes the difference between your body being able to attack and destroy the virus and having a totally ineffective defense

- viruses are super-sneaky and have a billion ways to avoid detection or distract your immune system. I don’t even know where to start on this one, if there’s a way to evade capture, a virus does it.

- Giant viruses! Sometimes ancient ones! As for the viruses infected by viruses -  “satellite viruses” (one is even named Sputnik) lacking all the necessary components hang out around large viruses and let them do all the work. They can’t replicate unless the bigger virus is already infecting a cell. 

- it’s possible that in extreme environments some viruses actually help their hosts a bit by supplying them with useful genes. Viruses in these environments are more likely to not kill (at least not immediately) their hosts, which makes sense when your hosts are few and far between. Instead they may integrate with their host’s genetic material and provide a helping hand to ensure their own replication as well.

- more on that - viruses are good at moving genes around because they sort of just package up genetic material in a neat protein coat and move on, and sometimes random stuff comes along for the ride.

- How about a virus that divides all its important parts into five separate packages?  It’s like virus trading cards, but once you collect them all, you get sick.

- it only takes one small change (the position of a single sugar, an extra link in a loop, some slight change in flexibility, etc…) in the structure of one piece of a virus to have an enormous impact on its ability to infect. An example is the flu - where exactly sugars decorate the virus is a key part of how well the virus works. 

- they’re just so…alien, more and more so the closer you look. Look at this little guy fusing with a cell during infection: