Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses, they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics. But respiratory infections are technically challenging and they've been underfunded, so we haven't made much progress against them.
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What I loved about jellyfish is they kind of resist all efforts to see ourselves in them. You look at a jellyfish and have to ask yourself, "Where is its mouth? Where are its eyes?" And I think that makes something a very good candidate for a monster, because what is a monster if something that we can't relate to and can't see ourselves in at all.
Book of the Day
Human language is generated by humans, right? So we understand it, right? We came up with it. RNA language, or the biological language, has evolved -- it was not generated by humans. So it's basically impenetrable for us.
TED
In the animal world, fathers have long been painted as aggressive or absent. At best providers and protectors, but certainly not caregivers. And yet for every tale of a lion or chimp dad eating its own young (yikes!), there's another creature who tells a sweeter story.
Radiolab