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Vir[i/ii/a/uses] As Nano-Blueprints? (Updated)
Auxon writes: "The Washington Post reports that researchers at the University of Texas "... have discovered that tiny protein-like strands on the surface of common viruses--the sort of molecules that enable germs to identify and grasp their target cells--also bind tightly and very selectively to materials widely used in high-tech electronics ..." They believe that this could be used to make templates with which they can grow circuits, in the same sort of manner that cells use calcium and other materials to produce bones, and oysters build their shells." I bet industrial sabotage could take on a whole new dimension with this as well. [Updated 9 June 3:55GMT by timothy] Pick your favorite plural of "virus" above :) All are supported by at least one comment posted below, but I concede the "ii" is probably best left to computer -- errr -- viruses.
Look here or here to find the reasons "virii" is stupid.
I'd like to know where you got viri. References, or something? The conjugation (I suppose that's what it is in Latin) of a noun in Latin doesn't mean that form is an English word.
According to Miriam-Webster's, the Oxford English Dictionary (a huge volume I have in print), dictionary.com, Brittanica, and Encarta, the plural for virus - in English now - is viruses. None of these sources have any entry or make any reference to either "viri" or "virii."
Please allow the grammar nazi to clear this up:
Specifically, we're interested in knowing whether you should refer to more than one virus as virii. Latin-lovers and viral votaries alike know that the noun virus is a borrowing from Latin. In that tongue, a virus (pronounced WEE-russ) is a venom, a poisonous emanation, a slimy liquid, or a stench. In fact, when virus first slithered its way into our language in the late 16th century, it named a "venom emitted by a poisonous animal."
The word's Latin ancestry has given some English speakers the idea that the only logical way to pluralize virus is to replace the terminal -us with the letters -ii . This idea seems especially popular among folks who are referring to more than one computer virus. But before you catch the bug for that new spelling, consider this: the notion that Latin words ending in -us must take an -ii plural is a flat-out fallacy. In fact, there is no evidence that any plural form of the classical Latin virus was ever recorded; some lexicographers even suspect the Latin virus was a mass noun (and thus needed no separate plural).
In addition, when you look at the historical record of English usage, you find viruses, not virii, as the established plural. So although virii has turned up upon recent occasions, that word is far from standard.
--this is only slightly plagerised
Keeping
I was just thinking about this reading the article and some of the comments-- here it is.
In the coming world of nanotechnology, will we really be aiming to miniaturize 'macrotechnology' to a molecular level? Or rather will we try to manipulate molecular and biological chemistry in such a way that it acheives the ends we are looking for? Are we just making little robots, or does, say, engineering a -virus- that repairs, I don't know, nerve damage, count as nanotechnology? Are we specifically limiting the term "nanotechnology" to superminiaturized electrical/mechanical technology? Or will nanotech involve elements of both mechanical and chemical engineering in the execution of the nanite's task?
Plenty of interesting questions for someone who knows more about this stuff than me to answer.
Yeah - everybody wants to have a different plural for virus or virii or whatever. But for crying out loud, use an accepted syntax in your titles- after all this is "News for Nerds". We can cope with your glob expressions! We can compose sonnets using regexps! Perl is our friend and pattern matching is our first language! So it's either:
vir{i,ii,a,uses} or it's
vir(a|ii?|uses)
Thank you and good night
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
This gives a whole new meaning to "bugs in the hardware" --- it'll be bugs making the hardware!
|/usr/games/fortune
Um, besides the wonderful benefit of building electronics this discovery provides...couldn't we build little nano-bots that bind to viruses in the body and render them inactive? I mean, I think that would be a much more useful and obvious use. It's funny how whenever anything is discovered we immediately try to apply it to computing.
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At-choo!
Does this mean wheat germs, bacteria-germs, virus-germs, or what??
One thing is certain:
Domestos (aka Chlorox) kills 99% of all known germs.
... Dead..
I know this is really late and most likely redundant by now, but everyone's favorite reference, www.dictionary.com, says this:
- --------------------------------
virus (vrs)
n., pl. viruses.
Any of various simple submicroscopic parasites of plants, animals, and bacteria that often cause disease and that consist essentially of a core of RNA or DNA surrounded by a protein coat. Unable to replicate without a host cell, viruses are typically not considered living organisms.
A disease caused by a virus.
Something that poisons one's soul or mind: the pernicious virus of racism.
Computer Science. A computer virus.
-----------------------------------------------
Sorry for the long post but I'd like to try and explain what was actually done here.
I just read the paper and what the researchers have shown is that they can identify short peptides(<=12 amino acids) that can bind to inorganic surfaces selectively (ie bind to GaAs but not SiO2). They accomplished this feat using a technique that is widely used in the molecular biology research community...Phage Display.
Basically a bacteriophage is a virus that infects bacteria. Viruses are molecular machines that consist of an outer protein shell holding the nucleic acids which contain the instructions for making more copies of the nucleic acids and the protein shell. The Protein shell contains a few copies of the P3 coat protein (5 in the case of the virus used here). This protein recognizes the cell to be infected and triggers the process of cell entry, whereupon the virus enter the cell and hijacks the cellular macinery to produce many copies of the virus. In this way the virus replicates.
These biologists added a random sequence of 36 nucleotides (DNA bases) to the end of the DNA sequence that encodes the P3 coat protein. Now the virus will produce a P3 protein that has 12 additional random amino acids added to the end of P3 (3 DNA bases make a codon that encodes one amino acid), giving 20^12 possible unique P3 proteins (20 amino acids at each position, 12 positions).
Then they created a pool of ~10^9 phage (way fewer than the possible 20^12) and selected for phage with peptide sequences that bound to the desired material (GaAs) by affinity selection. Those viruses that bound were amplified in bacteria following elution from the material. The selection is repeated several times to identify the tightest binding peptide sequences.
Using this process, they found peptides that bound selectively to many different semiconductor surfaces and speculate that somehow this could be used to create new circuitry.
What they have done is use a standard molecular biology technique to find peptides (short polymers of amino acids) that bind selectively to inorganic surfaces of a given composition.
At the end of the article they speculate that by joining two peptides selected for binding to two different materials they can get peptides that would bind selectively at the interface between two material surfaces. I think this is the nano part of the technology as those interfaces must be created by conventional means. This method may allow finer features to be created.
Overall this is an interesting paper that opens up new possibilities but as usual in the nanotech field, it is a long way from being useful.
Hope that made sense
Cheers
no sig.
This also brings a whole new dimension to virus 'software'. I can just see it: every computer is shipped with a preinstalled bio mass that feeds on electric current; genetically engineered to exude an antivirul odor.
Also brings a whole new dimension to office angst. Imagine the loss in production solely due to the smell...;-) And of course employies hacking their boxes to turn it off...and putting all the hacked units in the boss' system
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I'd say that the plural of a biological virus is "viruses" while of a computer virus is "virii". As for a biological virus that builds computers... viruses, because it's biological and not a computer program. This way, "My computer has viruses!" (as in biological things eating it) is differentiated from "My computer has virii!" (as in malicious programs).
This virus-protein binding looks like it could be useful in fabrication, but i wonder how finely they can control the binding. Could they lay out a circuit path, or would the 'wires' be too uneven and too likely to be built short circuited?
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perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
i just read a post about people mimicking "natural" models...kinda makes sense when you think that nature has beeng figuring shit out for a few billion years now :)
on the off-topic side. interesting fact is that there is no known cure for a single virus on the face of this earth. Sure, we have vaccines and such (we even have a drug coctail that will prevent you from getting aids - although no one in their right mind would want to use it due to the side effects), but there isn't a single cure for a virus...why do you think people still get colds?
FluX
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in spacing of 0.01 angstroms, how do we go about laying the 'path' for them to follow accurately enough so that they don't fall off?
I thought we had a problem with the wavelength of light used in current technologies being too large.
We have to be able to guide these bugs accurately for them to lay paths that are of any use to us.
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We already have this tech but its still being optimized. It is known as DNA chip technology. Pioneered by Affymax, they use the masking technology from silicon chip manufacturing to generate chips containing arrays of thousands of squares each containing a unique DNA sequence corresponding to a gene found only in particular viruses or other infectious organisms. Put some of your spit on this chip, heat to boiling, cool and if you have an infectious organism in your spit, you can measure the binding of the organisms DNA to the particular array spot on the chip thus identifying your infection. This will be the basis of a huge market in medical diagnostics in a few years.
no sig.
If serious science magazines are so great, why are you reading Slashdot? :)
(Seriously, just get used to the fact that 90% of the science stuff on Slashdot is complete speculation.)
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It could also pave the way for a better version of the bionic ear as well as other biotech.
It could even lead to implants similar to those depicted in the reality of Shadowrun. Jacked reflexes, skeletal sheathing/alteration, muscular augmentation, variable frequency optical prostheses, datajacks and implanted weaponry.
The optical prostheses have obvious uses as does most of the other stuff but datajacks could be used for more than they are in Shadowrun.
A person with irrepairable spinal damage or someone who has perfect cognitive function but has little or no control over their neuro-muscular system could be fitted with a datajack that could provide a degree of control over their bodies or their movement, either as a partial replacement for their spinal cord or as the control interface for a wheelchair or exoskeleton.
You could also use it for games like Q3 or UT. "You don't just play the game - you live it! (Pain is an optional extra.)"
At any rate I'd be prepared to sign up as a guinea-pig for the experiments as long as I got release equipment at the end. No way I'm getting a datajack until at least the second or thid generation. My wetware's bad enough without people poking wires in it.:)
Another application of the assembly aspect is the construction of nanobots and other nanotech.
I'm not going into a discussion of the possible evils of nanobots but I can see this image: Country A builds or grows a batch of deconstructor nanobots which are delivered to Country B.
The nanobots are programmed to reproduce themselves at a set rate until a preset limit is reached and have the ability to call others to their programmed target.
One day while one of these bots are reproducing an error creeps in. Instead of building a copy that stops reproducing at the preset limit something goes wrong and the copy doesn't have this limit and the error is not registered as such.
It continues to reproduce without stoping. Eventually they will cover the Earth if they cannot be stopped. All it would require is one nanobot to be missed and it starts over.
The severity of this depends on what the nanobots were programmed to destroy. Copper wiring? Aluminium? Steel? People?
Neal Stephenson wrote a book, the title of which I cannot remember. It was about a poor young girl who one-day found a book. Not just any book but a nanotech "Young lady's primer". Esentially it was a nanotech teaching device. The difference was in the actual construction. Instead of todays electrical circuitry it was mechanical. Kind of a vastly superior Babbage engine.
To me this seems more feasible than microscopic versions of todays computers.
In the book nanobots had been released and had propogated so much that on bad days it meant death to go outside without some kind of respiratory protection (a breathing mask).
Thats enough for now, I've spent far too long on this. When I first saw it there were 2 posts showing at a threshold of 0.
This post does contain blatant speculation and a tiny bit of scare-mongering. Any inaccuracies or mistakes are the fault of my insomnia, as is the length and any rambling that occurs.
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Ramble on!
mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
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This is all further evidence why we should quite speaking any lanuage that is based upon a dead language!
No more English, Latin, Russian, Chinese!
The whole world should communicate with Perl!
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Yes, and so did Natalie Portman naked and petrified, hot grits down someone pants, calling various people "karma whores", registering usernames similar to someone famous here and especially "first post". Some people just have bad taste.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
My preferred plural of virus would be virus, with a long u. This is after the correct pluralisation of prospectus.
And they call Donkey Kong by that name because it was a typo for Monkey Kong, made by someone at Nintendo, and they couldn't be bothered correcting it when they released the game outside Japan.
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OK, I'm not exactly a techno-geek, but with seven years of Hah-vud Law School behind me, I think that a bit of Latin has rubbed off on me. Here's the explanation:
"Virus" comes from the Latin word "Vi", meaning "crappy text editor". It is pluralised because one is creating the concept of multiple vi, adding feature after feature to create a completely bloated, horrifically crappy text editor.
To then double-pluralise it, one would be creating a concept of a text editor bloated beyond the point of reason, so that you actually question your own sanity.
I therefore submit that the plural of "Virus" is "Emacs".
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Actually, there are several types of neurons, some of which release chemical neurotransmitters and some of which use electrical signals to communicate with each other. The electrical signals are translated much faster, so they are better for reflex actions. Chemical synapses are much slower, as well as having a longer refractory period, but they are also more plastic, so they are better for such uses as long term memory.
Right now I'm trying to research ways of transmitting messages between neurons and implantable electronic devices, maybe someone's got the links here?
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"Don't think so Mike, why?"
"Well, we seem to have a supercomputer where the lab used to be."
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"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
Many other areas of development seem to be drifting closer to using natural models, the pharmaceutical industry has almost always depended on examining natural processes, earlier today slashdot posted a news item about scientists attempting to replicate the mechanism on a gecko's feet that allows it to grip. It seems only natural that electronics and micro-manufacture has a thing or two to learn for natural processes, after all, many of the things we strive for with the continuing development of technology have been done for countless years in the simplest of cells.
The relevance of this work to nanotechnology particularly interests me. If you haven't read Eric Drexler's
book 'Engines of Creation' it's something you should check out. The book discusses nanotechnology and suggests several things that should be done to prepare for it, none of which anyone has taken the slightest notice of (as far as I can tell). Does anyone else fear what may happen if true nanotechnology is developed in the near future without the slightest move to control it? Once it is here, it's far to late for control.
Or maybe the mice are using us for grander purposes than we even know.
The answer is 42.
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I think you'll end up being off by two orders of magnitude... I'm willing to bet it'll be within the next century:
b ot.papers/1991/Universal.Robot .910618.html
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/ro
http://www.transhumanist.com/volum e1/moravec.htm
:wq
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This tech seems like a start of an effective nerual interface technology. Bond a few of these guys to an active nerve and wire from them to the machine and you coudl create a nerual impluse reader. I will be interested to see how finely this process can be controlled.
The other interesting part of 'growing' computers is being able to play with the base media. I can imagine going to the electronics store and buying a new viral TV.
Instructions
1. Open Box
2. Spread paste on Desired wall
3. Wait 2 Days
4. Do not ingest leftover paste
Tommorrow is either going to be pretty cool or a nanotechnological wasteland!
Stinkydog
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â