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Joe Mahmood

Joe Mahmood

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THE PHANTOMS - UNSTOPPABLE NOW




What is a virus? How do they spread? How do they make us sick?

Viruses are the most common biological entities on Earth. Experts estimate there are around 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them, and if they were all lined up they would stretch from one side of the galaxy to the other.

You can think of them as nature’s own nanotechnology: molecular machines with sizes on the nanometre scale, equipped to invade the cells of other organisms and hijack them to reproduce themselves. While the great majority are harmless to humans, some can make you sick and some can even be deadly.

Are viruses alive?

Viruses rely on the cells of other organisms to survive and reproduce, because they can’t capture or store energy themselves. In other words they cannot function outside a host organism, which is why they are often regarded as non-living.

Outside a cell, a virus it wraps itself up into an independent particle called a virion. The virion can “survive” in the environment for a certain period of time, which means it remains structurally intact and is capable of infecting a suitable organism if one comes into contact.

When a virion attaches to a suitable host cell – this depends on the protein molecules on the surfaces of the virion and the cell – it is able to penetrate the cell. Once inside, the virus “hacks” the cell to produce more virions. The virions make their way out of the cell, usually destroying it in the process, and then head off to infect more cells.

Does this “life cycle” make viruses alive? It’s a philosophical question, but we can agree that either way they can have a huge impact on living things.

What are viruses made of?

At the core of a virus particle is the genome, the long molecule made of DNA or RNA that contains the genetic instructions for reproducing the virus. This is wrapped up in a coat made of protein molecules called a capsid, which protects the genetic material.

Some viruses also have an outer envelope made of lipids, which are fatty organic molecules. The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is one of these these “enveloped” viruses. Soap can dissolve this fatty envelope, leading to the destruction of the whole virus particle. That’s one reason washing your hands with soap is so effective!

What do viruses attack?

Viruses are like predators with a specific prey they can recognise and attack. Viruses that do not recognise our cells will be harmless, and some others will infect us but will have no consequences for our health.

Many animal and plant species have their own viruses. Cats have the feline immunodeficiency virus or FIV, a cat version of HIV, which causes AIDS in humans. Bats host many different kinds of coronavirus, one of which is believed to be the source of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Bacteria also have unique viruses called bacteriophages, which in some cases can be used to fight bacterial infections.

Viruses can mutate and combine with one another. Sometimes, as in the case of COVID-19, that means they can switch species.

Why are some viruses so deadly?

The most important ones to humans are the ones that infect us. Some families of viruses, such as herpes viruses, can stay dormant in the body for long periods of time without causing negative effects.

How much harm a virus or other pathogen can do is often described as its virulence. This depends not only on how much harm it does to an infected person, but also on how well the virus can avoid the body’s defences, replicate itself and spread to other carriers.

In evolutionary terms, there is often a trade-off for a virus between replicating and doing harm to the host. A virus that replicates like crazy and kills its host very quickly may not have an opportunity to spread to a new host. On the other hand, a virus that replicates slowly and causes little harm may have plenty of time to spread.

How do viruses spread?

Once a person is infected with a virus, their body becomes a reservoir of virus particles which can be released in bodily fluids – such as by coughing and sneezing – or by shedding skin or in some cases even touching surfaces.

The virus particles may then either end up on a new potential host or an inanimate object. These contaminated objects are known as fomites, and can play an important role in the spread of disease.

What is a coronavirus?

The coronavirus COVID-19 is a member of the virus family coronaviridae, or coronaviruses. The name comes from the appearance of the virus particles under a microscope: tiny protein protrusions on their surfaces mean they appear surrounded by a halo-like corona.

Other coronaviruses were responsible for deadly outbreaks of Serious Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China in 2003 and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) from 2012. These viruses mutate relatively often in ways that allow them to be transmitted to humans.

http://theconversation.com/what-is-a-virus-how-do-they-spread-how-do-they-make-us-sick-133437


VIRUS STRAINS

A virus is a very simple thing – a coat of protein wrapped around some genetic code (DNA or RNA). It’s not a cell and it’s not living.

Hijacking a host cell

A virus needs a host cell to be able to replicate itself. Once inside the host cell, it takes over. The cell is reprogrammed to produce the virus instead of doing what it was designed to do before. The virus is replicated thousands and thousands of times within that cell. Eventually, the cell bursts open and the multitude of viruses move around the body infecting other cells. This can happen within a few hours.

Mutation

Mutation is when something changes as it is replicating. Viruses survive through mutation. This is a random act, rather than a deliberate act of survival.

Some of the ways that viruses replicate are quite sloppy compared to the cells in our bodies. Our cells have special enzymes that make sure that a new cell has copied the gene sequence perfectly, but a virus is not so exact. The host cell (under instruction from the genetic material of the virus) produces, say, 50,000 copies of the virus, but they are often not going to be 100% exact.

https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/184-virus-strains
 
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Joe Mahmood

Joe Mahmood

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CAILIN RUSSO & CHRISSY COSTANZA - PHOENIX




The philosophers joined with the psychologists and neuroscientists and, eventually, "neurophilosophy" (which came of age with Patricia Churchland's famous book of that name) was born.

The neurophilosophical wing of English-speaking philosophy has flourished ever since, in part because of the glamour of neuroscience, in part because it is consistent with what leading neurophilosopher (and promoter of the computational theory of mind) Daniel Dennett called "the contemporary orthodoxy", namely that:

"There is only one sort of stuff, namely matter - the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology - and the mind is somehow nothing but physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain ... we can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition, and growth."

Many arguments have been put forward in support of "the contemporary orthodoxy", but the most direct and widely accepted one goes as follows. Our mental states have physical effects. If they did not then our thoughts and our intentions, and even perceptions, would not be able to bring anything about. We would have no free will, no capacity to alter the course of events; our intentions would not change the disposition of the world around us. In other words, if you really believe that you - your mental states - can change things in the physical world, you must believe that these mental states are physical states. The most plausible candidates for these physical causes are events in the brain; that is to say, nerve impulses. Hence mental phenomena must be composed of nerve impulses and the mind must be the activity of the brain.

Unfortunately, if you believe that these mental states are physical states then, some neurophilosophers have argued, they too must be the product of other physical states. They have a causal ancestry that reaches beyond anything that you would regard yourself as being. You - your brain, your mind, your consciousness - are wired into the universe. And the wiring does not simply connect you to your body, or even to your immediate environment; it goes all the way back to the initial conditions of the universe. In short, you are stitched into a seamless flow of material events subject to the laws of nature. Your actions cannot be in any way exempt from these laws. You are just a little byway in the boundless causal Nexus that is the material world.

There are many powerful counter-arguments and I shall come to these in the due course. For the moment, it looks as if not only everyday experience and sophisticated neuroscience, but also the philosophical argument, are in favour of the notion that our mind, our consciousness, our self-consciousness, our very selves, are identical with activity in the brain. Anyone who denies this must be flying in the face of fact and argument. And he or she probably has a hidden agenda. I have lost count of the number of times that I, proudly atheistic, have been accused of promoting religion by the back door.

Excerpts from the book title, "APING MANKIND" by Raymond Tallis.

http://www.raymondtallis.co.uk/pages/home.html

**************************************************************

19th March 2021

University of London physicist David Bohm suggested that the universe is a vast hologram in which, just as a hologram cut up contains the entire image in every piece, every part contains the whole order. This 'explicate order' was a projection from higher dimensional levels of reality. Like Jung, Bohm believed that Life and consciousness were enfolded in every level of matter. He said the separation of matter and spirit was an abstraction. Bohm's holographic paradigm, a popular idea among many scientists today, suggested a universe of infinite interconnectedness.

Then there's hyperstring theory, an imaginative idea that reconciles incongruities between relativity and quantum theory at the expense of adding six dimensions to our current four, some of them microscopic and curled up on themselves. It's a universe in which the notion of space and time disappear and energy is represented as tiny strands of spectral string, which crackle and fidget realistically in computer simulations but in reality cannot be seen.

Are ten dimensions enough? Some scientists have suggested there may be sixteen or seventeen. Scientific philosopher David Lewis thinks there could be an infinite number of them. Others say there's only one, and that this one is infinite enough for all of us - and our theories. Measures of the cosmic background radiation (the echo of the Big Bang) indicate that it is so large that all possible arrangements of matter must exist within it. In fact this universe contains, in a galaxy somewhere around 10 (to the power of 1028) light years away, an exact replica of our own planet and everything in it. Surely that's the coincidence to end all coincidences!

There may be logic in these theories, but is there reason? And if the reason that is there applies in the microscopic world of particles or the macroscopic world of galaxies, how does it apply to us who are stuck in the medium-size world of lawn mowers and armchairs? In this medium world we have to keep our feet on the ground.

Our advice is keep your head and don't accept any lifts from aliens. Keep looking our for coincidences, though, because it's healthy - or so says Professor Chris French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit of Goldsmiths College, London. 'We have been successful as a species precisely because we are good at making connections between events', he says. 'The price we have paid is a tendency to sometimes detect connections and patterns that are not really there.'

So caution is advisable, and beware that other human weakness defined by psychologists: apophenia, the spontaneous perception of connectedness and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. People with mental disorders seem particularly susceptible to it apparently. In fact there's a fierce debate about whether these experiences are a symptom of mental illness, or a cause.

In his book, The Challenge of Chance, science writer Arthur Koestler said that at the very least coincidences 'serve as pointers towards a single major mystery - the spontaneous emergence of order out of randomness, and the philosophical challenge implied in that concept. And if that sounds too rational or too occult, collecting coincidences still remains an amusing parlour game.'

Excerpts extracted from the book "BEYOND COINCIDENCE" by Martin Plimmer & Brian King.
 
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Joe Mahmood

Joe Mahmood

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ROYAL BLISS - CRAZY (From their album "WAITING OUT THE STORM")




In the Time of Pandemic

And the people stayed home.

And they read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still.

And they listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced.

Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.

And the people healed.

And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.

— Catherine M. O’Meara (a retired teacher in Madison, Wisconsin in March 2020)
 
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