pithovirus, satellite virus/virophage, lumberjack patron saint, Shameless

Mini rant: Various mentions of a new gigantic DNA virus which infects amoebas, uncovered in the Siberian permafrost, has been making the rounds on FB. More than two of my friends have independently associated this new virus with zombies, for reasons outside of my understanding. Can anyone please explain the zombie virus link to me? And it's that the virus is a zombie, apparently, and not that the virus is making cells into zombies (but the last one makes entirely more sense, as most viruses tend to just take over cells with the intent of producing new viruses, but that's another couple of posts entirely). This probably stems from the same source of irritation with which i view statements like, 'kills 99.9% of viruses'. Honey, you can't 'kill' them when they're not alive (this is also a hugely debatable topic and clearly i belong to the 'viruses are not alive' camp). However, someone DID link this incredibly comprehensive zombie classification chart.  Furthermore, the BBC article regarding this has decided to stir up sensationalist smallpox fears (with a nice, cover-all-the-bases caveat there at the end).

While poking around online, i came across this article (citing a guy clearly in the 'viruses are alive' camp) for virophage, or a small virus that co-infects a cell with (much) larger virus, for use of that larger virus' replication machinery. At the risk of sounding all hipster here, satellite viruses have been a thing in plant virology for years and didn't even get a mention (sigh), but i was pleased to note this statement on both wikipedia pages, "However, the usage of this term remains controversial due to the lack of fundamental differences between virophages and classical satellite viruses."

So i lost and subsequently found my notepad, after i'd already made a new one. My also-Catholic labmate Ryan commented about a patron saint of paper (writers, who happens to be St. Francis de Sales, btw), and this branched off into the patron saint of lumberjacks. i was impressed by this gentleman's footwear, and linked it to Bryan.

 me:  check this guy out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sint_Gommaar.png

patron saint of Lumberjacks

 Bryan:  i hearby declare too many saints

 me:  what?

you don't have that power

 Bryan:  you can't have a saint for every little thing

at most you can have like 320 saints

 me:  you can have a saint for every profession

and he's the patron saint of a lot of stuff; childless people, cowherders, glove makers, people with hernias, and wood cutters

 Bryan:  hmm

google says there's more than 10,000 canonized saints

 me:  i was just about to link that

no Brians/Bryans

no jessicas

i mentioned yesterday to Jack that i had the Garth Brooks version of the Billy Joel song 'Shameless' stuck in my head, which is bad because it's not necessarily one to howl in public (and in hearing the Billy Joel version, it's incredibly weird without the steel guitar that my childhood training taught me to expect). Jack, i'm pretty sure you've heard multiple Garth songs, for instance his Friends In Low Places (and let me just state here that i had a heck of a time finding a non-cover of this song. Sheesh, even the first one that pops up on youtube via google is a cover, though it is not labeled such.)

Thing that i finally learned this week; Holland is a northeaster region in the Netherlands, despite being applied as a name for the whole country.

anechoic chamber, paper dresses, automotive speed limits, cholera belts

We had a whole-floor ice cream party in lab a few days ago, and the discussion turned to the Orfield anechoic chamber in Minnesota (we got a new electric clock, and it clicks loudly every minute... okay). So i looked the chamber up; it's a negative decibel level, so you hear even your organs functioning. It's used to test noise emitted by various things, to see how they can be made quieter. There is an e-tour featured on this very informative page.

So the Olympics happened. i wound up getting to watch some of the various ice dancing and skating, and snowboarding, luging, and tracked down skeleton. Regarding ice dancing, the some highly amusing coverage came via comedy writer for Vanity Fair magazine, and collectively can be found here. Looking further into the event known as skeleton  (due to the 'boney appearance of the sled'), check out this GoPro video (brief cursing in the middle; apparently the rider shredded a shoe accidentally).

Someone linked this huffpost article of a 4 year old girl who makes her own dress-up dresses out of paper. This is really neat, and something to keep in mind for future babysitting.

In defense of the dietary habits of certain friends-who-should-not-be-encouraged-in-them, apparently this dude ate a lot of pizza in the last 25 years.

The topic of automotive speed limits came up in discussion the other day; a labmate is from Montana, which only recently posted a speed limit, with the former indicator being 'reasonable and prudent speed'. i mentioned a particular highway in Texas upped the speed limit to 85 mph (woo!). It's a tollway between San Antonio and Austin, and slightly (even more) dangerous because it's not super high traffic, so sometimes animals wander across and cause massive accidents (it's difficult to slow down from 85 mph). Also, speeding cameras. Interestingly, from the wikipedia article, " 80 miles per hour (129 km/h) is slower than the 130 km/h (81 mph) recommended speed on the Autobahn and the actual 130 km/h (81 mph) speed limit for freeway-class roads in thirteen European countries and the Australian Northern Territory." It also surprised me to see that Utah's speed limit is a standard 80 mph.

Finally, i was reading a NYTimes article about a book about British women who were sent by the East India company to India and serve as " what came to be known as the fishing fleet, which supplied a steady cargo of potential brides to generations of expats ". Somewhere within the article, a piece of clothing called a 'cholera belt' is mentioned. i figured it to be a sort of belt which was soaked in something to repel mosquitos or misasma or foul spirits, but went ahead and looked it up. Turns out, a cholera belt is simply a piece of flannel designed to keep one's abdomen warm, "the theory being that a chilled abdomen would lead to cholera, dysentery, diarrhea, and other gastrointestinal ailments. Doctors realized fairly early on that cholera had little to do with cold and damp and was in fact caused by fecal bacteria in drinking water. But military inertia being what it was, use of the belt persisted until after World War II" , cited here (and go ahead and read that; it has another interesting anecdote). Further research pulled up this fascinating academic article from 1957, and a report of how cholera influenced the life/writing of Rudyard Kipling.