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How Many Bits Does It Take To Kill You?
pegr writes "Andrew 'bunnie' Huang, Reverse Engineer, XBox hacker, and generally smart guy, muses over the H1N1/swine flu virus as only a reverse engineer can: 'I now know how to modify the virus sequence to probably make it more deadly.' Not that he would, of course. bunnie has consistently made the esoteric available to us mere mortals, and his overview of the H1N1 virus is a fascinating read from a unique perspective." (Seen today also at the top of Schneier on Security.)
It's like evolution is the demo coder and humans are the Amigas.
The Epstein-Barr virus, now there is a successful virus.
Liberty.
If only biologists had thought of the idea of treating DNA/RNA sequences as data, and then analyzing their properties statistically and computationally, with an eye towards what effects different modifications to the sequences might be predicted to have. We might call this field something fancy like "biological informatics".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7026801162637347552
How many bits does it take to kill a human? Bits of what is the real question?
Bits of information? Bits of bullets? Bits of concrete? Bits of glass? Bits of a virus?
They can all get the job done given the right, er wrong, context.
3.2KiB of data with the flu eh?
How about three bytes, 24 bits, uttered from the mouth of Bush? "War"! That killed a whole bunch of people with a lot less information. Ok, sure there was lots of supporting info.
Many people have died from a lot fewer bits than the flu needs.
I don't know, go ask Mr. Owl.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
As we extinguish species by the ark load it's worth musing where all their on board viruses and bacterium will land when they jump ship onto a new species. Reminds me of the ship of sick sailors who landed in Italy with the first boat load of rats bearing the plague. Supposedly many of the viruses that now plague us have adapted to us by way of our domestic livestock, especially fowl. We may be setting the table for the little critters with our obsessive need for antibiotics and wiping all indoor surfaces down with lethal cleaners. The Swiss did some research and found that farm kids raised tending livestock had stronger immune systems than Swiss city kids raised in sanitized urban housing.
ideopath @ play
Sounds like we need a firewall.
Change 1 of the DNA base and the embryo cannot grow to completion. Change a base and a cancer can suddenly develop and go awry (for example, kill the apoptose system of the cells). Kill one bit in the mytochondrial DNA and you probably get the same. I am not a biologist , and I am sure there are a lot of redundant gene, but some might not.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Only if the firewall also performs deep packet inspection. Many bad critters (viruses/bacteria) enter the system by making our firewall(s) think they are innocuous by externally looking link other good critters. It is the payload that is the real problem. If we could teach the body to somehow read the payload before docking with the receptors we could be disease (contracted from viruses/bacteria) free.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Only if the firewall also performs deep packet inspection. Many bad critters (viruses/bacteria) enter the system by making our firewall(s) think they are innocuous by externally looking link other good critters. It is the payload that is the real problem. If we could teach the body to somehow read the payload before docking with the receptors we could be disease (contracted from viruses/bacteria) free.
Nanoprobe-supported organs. Once again, Star Trek has beaten us to it.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
32 bytes, 256 bits..
Don't you think she looks tired?
The television will not be revolutionized.
http://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/ is a wonderful comparison of DNA to code
Umm, I'm confused by this ranting.
FTFA: As you can see, we have 'GAA' coding for 'E' (Glutamic acid). To modify this genome to be more deadly, we simply need to replace 'GAA' with one of the codes for Lysine ('K'), which is either of 'AAA' or 'AAG'.
Article author points out that TWO triplets both translate into Lysine. OP's ability to RTFA is bunk. Learn to not troll.
Yes, troll feeding is bad, but honestly,
that there was a Swine Flu vaccine back in the 1970's that caused a 300% mortality rate on all the "volunteers,"
This alleged vaccine killed the subject, revived them, killed them a second time, revived them again, and finally killed them off (for good) a third time?
Math is hard, clearly.
The 26,000-some bit virus only exists in the context of a host that contains considerably more DNA information than that. To use the awful computer analogies, it's like running a 26K program on a 300MB interpreter system; the small program just calls some combination of really complex, pre-built functions that shouldn't be called in that combination.
And keep in mind that the 300MB interpreter is meaningless without the context in which it executes: some physical machine.
Are you adequate?
Actually, they had a control group who were given a placebo who also died even though they had not even been given the vaccine. Also, the researchers died and through luck these two groups were each the exact same size as the group given the vaccine, thus the 300% mortality rate.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
It would actually take less than that, though it wouldn't spread the same way. Remember that prions are proteins that can kill you rather than whole viruses. The protein that gets misfolded in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (or mad cow) seems to be called just Prion protein and is only 253 amino acids. If bunnie is correct and one amino acid = 6 bits, then thats 1,518 bits. "Bit calculator" tells me that would be 0.185 kbytes.
Granted, this wouldn't be airborne death, would be extremely slow, and wouldn't cause a pandemic, but still, far less data.
Even if you were to go the viral route, at least one virus is tricky in that it produces multiple proteins from overlapping reading frames. That is, the same sections of RNA genome (sendai uses RNA instead of DNA) is read in multiple ways to make different functional proteins, one protein might be formed from reading AUG GAU GGG CAG, which would make the amino acid sequence MDGQ, but that could aso be read as A UGG *AUG* GGC AG where the starred AUG is the start, making a protein of MG. I find that pretty cool, because as Carl Sagan pointed out, try doing that with english. "Romancement to get her" can be spaced differently to produce "roman cement together" is the longest he could come up with and it doesn't even make sense. Viruses make whole proteins that work. Anyway, the point of all that was that viruses can in some cases double up, so it would take even fewer nucleotides to produce the same amount of protiens.
Although for many unwashed masses your ramblings look quasi-brilliant, your analysis has WAY too many holes. Each triplet is translated into ONE of TWENTY amino acids. You know what? Some triplets are translated to the SAME amino acids. Your analysis is bunk. Learn your biology.
Yes, each triplet is translated into one amino acid (OK, there are a few which are translated into none). There's no single triplet which is translated into two or more amino acids. The fact that several triplets are translated into the same amino acid doesn't change that (even if you shout). Learn your logic.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's humblings that I could be killed by 3.2kbytes
3.2 kbytes should be enough to kill anyone.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Looking at the amino acid and codon table I noticed another interesting point: The triples which code for the same amino acid typically differ only in the last base. Indeed, this can be made stronger: Except for the STOP codon, in each set of codons with no more than four members, the first two bases are always the same (for those with more than four codons that's of course not possible). Moreover, quite a few amino acids have exactly four codons which differ only in the last base, i.e. the amino acid is completely and unambiguously determined by the first two bases alone. Indeed, one can rearrange this into the following 16-entry table:
Note how many lines only have one entry on the right hand side. Could this mean the genetic code evolved from a two-base version (with only 15 amino acids) to the current three-base version?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Coral Cache of the site, not running super fast but it'll get there.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
The protein that gets misfolded in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (or mad cow) seems to be called just Prion protein and is only 253 amino acids. If bunnie is correct and one amino acid = 6 bits, then thats 1,518 bits.
So you're saying that it would take just 11 posts on Twitter to kill someone?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I'm pretty sure one bit can kill you... if your logic levels are 50,000V and -50,000V, anyway.
The coat proteins do more than just carry the DNA to your cells, they allow the virus to actually get inside the cell. That's a pretty major part of a virus, the DNA itself is not going to get inside a cell to produce an infection. There are also more proteins inside many viruses that are essential HIV has several for example. Influenza does too. So it requires more than just the data to kill you.
Viroids are infectious particles that are just nucleotides, just the data. All the viroids that we know of though infect plants, not humans. That wiki page mentions Hepatitis D as viroid like, but it hitches a ride on another hepatitis, without the viral proteins of that virus it can't infect.
You're right, of course, everything you said I pretty much hinted at, however. I wasn't wanting to go too in debt (my mistake).
"The coat proteins do more than just carry the DNA to your cells, they allow the virus to actually get inside the cell." == "The outer coating (proteins) are just the vessel to carry the DNA into your cells"
The protein coat, quite often, mimics a molecule that triggers a cell to eat the virus. Granted, that's just one of the methods various virii (viruses?) use.
"There are also more proteins inside many viruses that are essential HIV has several for example." == "Some, however, come with their own spiffy enzymes that embed DNA into your genome so you can make plenty more..."
This being the exact mechanism that HIV embeds itself into a genome. I'm sure you know that an enzyme is a protein (although, technically a RNA enzyme is not a protein...)
I was poorly arguing that it's the data that one has to be worried about in this case. Free-floating DNA can make its way into a cell, it's rare, but it can happen ("the hard part - but can happen easily sometimes"). I should have been a proper biologist and clarified we're talking eukaryotic cells, bacteria pick up random DNA all the time and do it gleefully (note: bacteria do not contain glee). Bacteria then can run the DNA, eat the DNA, whatever it wants to do.
Once there, the data/DNA then creates havoc by existing, the cell's machinery follows the destructive data and starts to build until it dies (doesn't always die). It builds proteins, which are used to build more virii (viruses?) duplicates more DNA/RNA, the virus self-assembles, leaves and continues on with a nice and shiny protein-coat (or whatever it wants to coat itself with, sometimes parts of you).
Much like a computer virus (DNA) embedded in a program (cell). Normal program instructions are ran, the CPU comes across viral opcodes - runs those too - then continues on like nothing happened...assuming it's a well written computer virus. All the business about transferring a virus via flashdisk, floppy, email, etc (protein coat) - while essential - is secondary to the viral payload itself, the code/data/dna/rna. In my opinion...
If you can change the constants of the universe, you probably already killed everyone an infinite number of times, preemptively.
What is the sound of an infinite number of voices crying out and suddenly silenced?