This reminds me of the story between a cable-box developer and crackers. I'll need to find the exact story, but it goes something like this:
The developer would send an over-the-air update, the crackers would crack it within days and provide that to their userbase. Usually the crackers would just nop out the few instructions that branched into DRM code or something.
At some point, the crackers noticed that the OTAs seemed to include "dead" code, that wasn't being called by anything. Just in case it was used by the live code, they left it in. It didn't prevent their cracks.
Then, a little bit down the line, an OTA update made use of all those pieces of dead code to simultaneously harden legitimate boxes against cracking, and brick hacked boxes. The developer had, in effect, distributed his countermeasures piecemeal in order to pass the crackers guards and be included in the cracked network, and in one delayed action assembled and activated the countermeasure.
Offtopic: man, those were the good days of Slashdot, two tech news+comments sites ago for me. I then gradually switched to Reddit, and now HN. I wonder what will be next.
I had a slightly different thought, along the lines of forward error correction and splitting up the coded message to make sure the loss of one or two pieces is tolerable.
“Although multicomponent genomes are relatively common among RNA viruses that infect plants and fungi, this method of genome organization has not previously been seen in animal viruses.”
Edit: Thinking about this more, I wonder if this might be some sort of virus crossover vector from plants to animals? Mosquitos are in a somewhat unique position ecologically - they require nectar from plants to survive, and they may bite several different animals to acquire blood for reproduction (spreading viruses along the way).
Why if instead of spending money researching the diseases that mosquitos could transmit to humans on the future we spend all that money into figuring out a way to exterminate all mosquitos from the surface of earth once and for all?
As someone who lives on a tropical country and had have both Dengue and Chikungunya I can attest mosquitos are pure evil, and there are several researchs suggesting they serve no purpose on keeping the enviromental equilibrium (if they are gone, they won't be missed, the enviroment will be fine...)
On a side note, reading "U.S. Army Medical Research" , "Infectious Diseases", "new virus" and "mosquitos" in the same article makes no good to my paranoia...
You don't even need to wipe out all mosquitoes - just a few species (something like 6 out of 300) account for the vast majority of disease transmitted.
Yes, after the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, we need a War on Mosquitoes. It'd be a much better allocation than the other wars and much more beneficial for humanity.
I can already picture the SWAT teams running with their electrical mosquito swatters :-)
We generally arent trying to cure diseases. I mean, individual researchers want to find cures (e.g. the dedicated clinician who went to med school because her mother had breast cancer, the passionate hacker who eschewed private buses and free lunches at some startup to work at a research institute) Generally though, the pressure of the overall system is to make as much money as possible.
If you cure someone's disease, they pay once. If your goal is to make money the optimal path is to manage symptoms but keep customers (i.e. patients) reliant on your treatments, ideally with their life depending on them.
Having said that, there are many people working to find new ways to control mosquito populations, especially with zika being in the news, especially with zika starting to affect the continental U.S. (No one cares when its just American Samoa and Hawaii but Florida is a little too close to home).
I just read an article last week where essentially researchers had designed frankenstein gigolo mosquitoes that would steal your lady, impregnate her, but the resulting bastard frankensteins would die before reaching maturity.
Why if instead of spending money researching the diseases that mosquitos could transmit to humans on the future we spend all that money into figuring out a way to exterminate all mosquitos from the surface of earth once and for all?
As if that were somehow... easier, or even more tractable?
They're arguably (much) better optimized for long-term survival than we are, you know.
I think an alien looking at life on earth might find it very peculiar that so many of our life forms split into 2 independent parts that are unable to reproduce unless they match up with a partner of the opposite "sex". This is no stranger than that -- but it's fascinating to us who haven't encountered it before.
The "sex" thing turns out to have big advantages: mostly that it allows for faster evolution by allowing mixing of genes between the two different genders so new advantageous traits can be spread through the population much faster than if each organism simply copied itself. I'll bet this scheme has advantages too -- the smaller size of the components (useful for getting through various membranes and other defenses) is an obvious one, there may be others that are less obvious.
Might be strange that we have sexes. Might also be strange that we only have 2 sexes. Many plants have two different generational types (haploid and diploid). Meaning each "generation" alternates between two different organism types. Fungi have both sexual and assexual reproduction [2]. But their sexual reproduction occurs when two cells directly fuse and then undergo meiosis into haploid spores instead of a diploid organism. Haplodiploidy occurs in insects where males are haploid by females are diploid [3]. Sex can be much more complicated than what it is in humans. Alien species may have even more complicated systems for genetic recombination.
I doubt it. I suspect that for sufficiently complex creatures, sex is the rule not the exception. The benefits from genetic crossover are so powerful from an evolutionary survival point of view, that it very much outweighs the cost of coordinating said crossover. With asexual reproduction, one small shift in climate, and your entire species risks extinction. There's just not enough genetic variation to deal with all the possible ways that local conditions can change on you.
Crossover is so powerful from an algorithmic sense, that you don't even need spot mutations for a genetic algorithm to converge on a solution. And crossover algorithms will tend to converge on solutions much faster than algorithms using only point mutations.
Basically from the books I've read on the topic of Artificial Life, there tends to be a very strong pull to species developing 2 sexes in simulations. Rarely are there more than 2 sexes though since the cost of coordinating more actors isn't offset by the marginal benefit of having more gene diversity.
There was one ALife experiment I heard of that managed to converge on 5 partnered sex, though I'm not sure if that meant the species had 5 distinct sexes, or if you needed 5 genetic donors to guarantee reproduction.
I'm not near my library, else I'd link some of the books on the topic that I really liked.
Two of my most favorite books tries to shine light on some of the different aspects of your (first) question. Maybe the unexpected findings during the pursuit of this question will be as fascinating to you as it was to me.
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped Human Nature (2000) (Geoffrey Miller)
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (Matt Ridley)
"The maintenance of sexual reproduction in a highly competitive world has long been one of the major mysteries of biology given that asexual reproduction can reproduce much more quickly."
This would make for an interesting scifi plot. A global virus spreads that has multiple parts and people must limit their contact with specific people or risk acquiring components that activate the parts of the virus they carry.
In one of Greg Egan's short stories there is a religious maniac who engineers a deadly STD so as to permit only one lifetime sexual partner, lest the virus be activated and kill the fornicator. (If I remember the plot correctly. It's in the "Axiomatic" short story collection.)
All I can think about after reading that is how to create some set of logic gates for data transfer. What if different combinations of the parts of a virus could be formed into different actual viruses and produce a single new output variant.
For Example, you could combine 00, 01, 11, 10 and then the two part virus would output the result of a NAND operation. We could have naturally occurring computations in nature.
Each mosquito could be seen as a single "cpu" and it's output would be to infect another mosquito. Not sure how you'd collect all the results though, or how you'd not just have endless cycles... perhaps the life of each individual cell could be encoded in DNA/RNA where two virus parts can only come together if their DNA/RNA has the same "clock cycle" encoded (similar to lamport/vector clocks).
The Central Dogma and all it's exceptions are fascinating stuff. It all acts like a computer in many ways, but since it has to balance on the edge of statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics and has a very angry set of Maxwell's Demons (say, a lambda virus) always coming in and messing it all up, DNA has evolved many very cool features.
How is this different from the hepatitis D virus? Hepatitis D isn't complete, and can only propagate if there is a hepatitis B infection. In other words, you can only get hepatitis D if you already have the hepatitis B virus, and then it makes things worse.
Hepatitis delta is a satellite virus, of which there are many. The virus described in this article doesn't seem to be considered a satellite virus because, presumably because no part of it is replication-competent. It's a single virus that has its genome segments packaged separately.
Ok, off tangent a bit, but if you randomly sample mosquitoes, those mosquitos have limited flight range, and you find things about the blood meals they have eaten. Are you at risk of invading the privacy of people who live near the mosquitoes?
Very interesting question. What if, by chance, you tested that blood and found it positive for HIV? What are your ethical obligations viz. notification as one example? (Mosquitos can't transmit HIV, but they can capture the virus while feeding)
Wow that's crazy. It could explain why certain viruses affect people and not others. The afflicted could have latent viral compatible genes in their personal genomes. It'll be really interesting what this means for vaccines.
This is very cool,
It rather effectively simulates sexual reproduction in a virus.
Furthermore, the host could develop an immune response to one strain of a module, catch another strain and the other dormant modules once again become active.
One scary facet of the way that this works, if there exist module combinations that prove lethal to the hosts, there is a significantly reduced likelihood that the infection will burn itself out - the lethal version can exist spread out across the population randomly combining to strike down some poor innocent mosquito.
Disclaimer: I'm not a virologist, and there's a good chance I'm full of shit.
In rather abstract evolution mechanics, this isn't much different from requiring male and female counterparts to procreate.
All that happens here is that smaller entities are a better fit for the environment, while only a combination of them stores the full information required for another entity to be created. In simulations this has been seen quite often.
It's funny how us humans tend to figure out laws and rules and forget that they are derived, not dictated and that nature will do it's own thing regardless of what we've so far figure out.
The virus is not breaking any rules, we messed up in figuring out what the rules were in the first place.
Just a thought: I wonder if the virus uses some form of redundancy encoding like certain RAID or file XOR systems use. I wonder if RNA/DNA has a checksum or data correction code somewhere?
It would be really neat if this virus does something like that. It might be why the 5th viral component is not required.
It actually is likely the opposite. Many viruses deliberately avoid checksumming and error correcting, as that's how it generates better modular parts - through errors and variation. Some viruses like HPV actively shut down their host's error-correction equipment, so that they may be more effective (why HPV infections greatly increase chance of cancer). If you have a multi-part system where your factory is producing literally billions of variants of each, and you want better parts, one way to do that is to have each part be slightly different. Those that naturally work best together will go on to be more, well, virulent.
> I wonder if RNA/DNA has a checksum or data correction code somewhere?
You may consider CRISPR mechanism that Bacteria use to defend themselves against mutations introduced by the invading viruses as sort of data corerction.
As for greater organisms, it seems that preferable approach is to have copies of single genes in case. Apparently some species are more resistant to cancer to other due to number of anti-cancerous genene they posses in their DNA. Phenomena is known as Peto's Paradox:
A team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases has found a mosquito virus that's broken up into pieces. And the mosquito needs to catch several of the pieces to get an infection.
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|9 years ago|reply
At some point, the crackers noticed that the OTAs seemed to include "dead" code, that wasn't being called by anything. Just in case it was used by the live code, they left it in. It didn't prevent their cracks.
Then, a little bit down the line, an OTA update made use of all those pieces of dead code to simultaneously harden legitimate boxes against cracking, and brick hacked boxes. The developer had, in effect, distributed his countermeasures piecemeal in order to pass the crackers guards and be included in the cracked network, and in one delayed action assembled and activated the countermeasure.
Edit: Ah, here was the story from 2001 about the "Black Sunday Kill", and it was DirectTV: https://slashdot.org/story/01/01/25/1343218/directvs-secret-...
And it looks like this was the guy who did it: http://www.wired.com/2008/05/tarnovsky/?currentPage=all
I got a bunch of the details wrong (hey, it's been 15 years!) but that's the gist of it. The Slashdot story has the meat of it!
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DigitalJack|9 years ago|reply
I had a slightly different thought, along the lines of forward error correction and splitting up the coded message to make sure the loss of one or two pieces is tolerable.
[+] [-] jobu|9 years ago|reply
“Although multicomponent genomes are relatively common among RNA viruses that infect plants and fungi, this method of genome organization has not previously been seen in animal viruses.”
Edit: Thinking about this more, I wonder if this might be some sort of virus crossover vector from plants to animals? Mosquitos are in a somewhat unique position ecologically - they require nectar from plants to survive, and they may bite several different animals to acquire blood for reproduction (spreading viruses along the way).
[+] [-] mataug|9 years ago|reply
Are sci-news's usual writeups bad ? Why is it surprising ? Other from sci-news seemed fine to me .
[+] [-] otto_ortega|9 years ago|reply
As someone who lives on a tropical country and had have both Dengue and Chikungunya I can attest mosquitos are pure evil, and there are several researchs suggesting they serve no purpose on keeping the enviromental equilibrium (if they are gone, they won't be missed, the enviroment will be fine...)
On a side note, reading "U.S. Army Medical Research" , "Infectious Diseases", "new virus" and "mosquitos" in the same article makes no good to my paranoia...
[+] [-] jpfed|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicolas_t|9 years ago|reply
I can already picture the SWAT teams running with their electrical mosquito swatters :-)
[+] [-] latj|9 years ago|reply
If you cure someone's disease, they pay once. If your goal is to make money the optimal path is to manage symptoms but keep customers (i.e. patients) reliant on your treatments, ideally with their life depending on them.
Having said that, there are many people working to find new ways to control mosquito populations, especially with zika being in the news, especially with zika starting to affect the continental U.S. (No one cares when its just American Samoa and Hawaii but Florida is a little too close to home).
I just read an article last week where essentially researchers had designed frankenstein gigolo mosquitoes that would steal your lady, impregnate her, but the resulting bastard frankensteins would die before reaching maturity.
[+] [-] kafkaesq|9 years ago|reply
As if that were somehow... easier, or even more tractable?
They're arguably (much) better optimized for long-term survival than we are, you know.
[+] [-] onewaystreet|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DicksenZuider|9 years ago|reply
Birds, insects, spiders, salamanders, lizards and frogs could lose their primary food source.
Wiping out a large part of the ecology could be a disaster.
[+] [-] reddytowns|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkrisc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reddytowns|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mcherm|9 years ago|reply
The "sex" thing turns out to have big advantages: mostly that it allows for faster evolution by allowing mixing of genes between the two different genders so new advantageous traits can be spread through the population much faster than if each organism simply copied itself. I'll bet this scheme has advantages too -- the smaller size of the components (useful for getting through various membranes and other defenses) is an obvious one, there may be others that are less obvious.
[+] [-] dexwiz|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://sciencelearn.org.nz/Contexts/Ferns/Sci-Media/Animatio... [2] https://www.boundless.com/biology/textbooks/boundless-biolog... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy
[+] [-] milesvp|9 years ago|reply
Crossover is so powerful from an algorithmic sense, that you don't even need spot mutations for a genetic algorithm to converge on a solution. And crossover algorithms will tend to converge on solutions much faster than algorithms using only point mutations.
Basically from the books I've read on the topic of Artificial Life, there tends to be a very strong pull to species developing 2 sexes in simulations. Rarely are there more than 2 sexes though since the cost of coordinating more actors isn't offset by the marginal benefit of having more gene diversity.
There was one ALife experiment I heard of that managed to converge on 5 partnered sex, though I'm not sure if that meant the species had 5 distinct sexes, or if you needed 5 genetic donors to guarantee reproduction.
I'm not near my library, else I'd link some of the books on the topic that I really liked.
[+] [-] zrth|9 years ago|reply
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped Human Nature (2000) (Geoffrey Miller)
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (Matt Ridley)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen:_Sex_and_the_Evo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_(psychologist)...
[+] [-] malz|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_sexual_reproducti... [NSFW: animal porn]
[+] [-] jotux|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmurf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emilga|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluejekyll|9 years ago|reply
For Example, you could combine 00, 01, 11, 10 and then the two part virus would output the result of a NAND operation. We could have naturally occurring computations in nature.
Each mosquito could be seen as a single "cpu" and it's output would be to infect another mosquito. Not sure how you'd collect all the results though, or how you'd not just have endless cycles... perhaps the life of each individual cell could be encoded in DNA/RNA where two virus parts can only come together if their DNA/RNA has the same "clock cycle" encoded (similar to lamport/vector clocks).
[+] [-] Balgair|9 years ago|reply
The Central Dogma and all it's exceptions are fascinating stuff. It all acts like a computer in many ways, but since it has to balance on the edge of statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics and has a very angry set of Maxwell's Demons (say, a lambda virus) always coming in and messing it all up, DNA has evolved many very cool features.
[+] [-] jcoffland|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kens|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_D
[+] [-] zbjornson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcraft|9 years ago|reply
They would have to only take a blood meal from a single host and you'd have to be able to correlate the data - but maybe?
[+] [-] etendue|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gall|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmyjavec|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MollyR|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yarg|9 years ago|reply
Furthermore, the host could develop an immune response to one strain of a module, catch another strain and the other dormant modules once again become active.
One scary facet of the way that this works, if there exist module combinations that prove lethal to the hosts, there is a significantly reduced likelihood that the infection will burn itself out - the lethal version can exist spread out across the population randomly combining to strike down some poor innocent mosquito.
Disclaimer: I'm not a virologist, and there's a good chance I'm full of shit.
[+] [-] joshpadnick|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing
[+] [-] wimagguc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kusmi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|9 years ago|reply
The virus is not breaking any rules, we messed up in figuring out what the rules were in the first place.
[+] [-] Severian|9 years ago|reply
It would be really neat if this virus does something like that. It might be why the 5th viral component is not required.
[+] [-] toufka|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ralfp|9 years ago|reply
You may consider CRISPR mechanism that Bacteria use to defend themselves against mutations introduced by the invading viruses as sort of data corerction.
As for greater organisms, it seems that preferable approach is to have copies of single genes in case. Apparently some species are more resistant to cancer to other due to number of anti-cancerous genene they posses in their DNA. Phenomena is known as Peto's Paradox:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox
[+] [-] zellyn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] known|9 years ago|reply