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).
Poor choice of words maybe. Mostly I was surprised by the lower than expected quality of article on NPR. The title is clickbaity, and they definitely missed key bits of information.
Seems like whenever NPR reports on subjects I happen to know really really well I find myself disappointed. Makes me wonder about the rest of their reporting.
This generally goes for all media entities. Similar scrutiny should be applied to all subjects, not just those for which we're experts. It's a common fallacy to take news of unfamiliar subjects at face value, while understanding that there is far more to the stories we know well than that which is contained in one piece of media.
NPR is almost as bad as CNN and such, but it's marketed towards intellectuals through linguistics. I noticed whenever they speak on a topic I'm deeply familiar with, they use overly-complicated wordage to get the point across while missing important details. Almost like how "over-designed" websites usually have terrible backends.
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.
Agreed. Mosquitoes are important pollinators and necessary members of our food chain, we would be hurting without their help. Only reproducing females require a blood meal, further complicating the issue.
To that end, check out this [0] anti-mosquito laser weapon, which they claim can be tuned to target only females based on wing beat frequencies. While I disagree with the principal, a laser mosquito defense system gets cool points from me for creativity.
Whit the zika outbreak I thought, what if we could some how harden(genetics) the mosquito inmune system to fight off zika? (or any other undesirable virus)
Then find a way to replace the native populations with the hardened ones. (For example some kind of selective trap)
Something similar to what is currently done with livestock, which is vaccinated against many posible human patogens.
I think, experimentation with mosquitoes could be more agressive that trying to find a way to cure a human. And you would not eliminate the population which could lead to problems down the road.
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 :-)
I think we already had one... back in the 60's. DDT use was widespread worldwide. My Dad even used it at our cottage... best summer ever, next to no mosquitoes. Unfortunately DDT has a big impact on birds... softens the eggshell such that eggs don't hatch/grow. DDT is outlawed in a lot of places... but by no means all.
We almost won the war on mosquitoes but our allies the birds would have been wiped out if we'd kept fighting :)
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.
It is common mistaken belief that drug companies don't have an incentive to find cures.
Cures are actually tremendously profitable. You can charge more money for a cure than drugs for a lifetime of symptom management, because cures result in better outcomes and significant cost savings for the entire healthcare system.
The recent development of cures for Hepatitis C is a perfect case in point. Gilead is pulling in $10B+/year in revenue from these drugs. There has been plenty of outrage about how much Sovaldi costs, but it's still way cheaper than a liver transplant.
That said, you're probably right that it would be difficult to profit directly off of exterminating mosquitoes. That's exactly that sort of research that governments should (and do) fund (search for "gene drives").
Even that fails in comparison to preventing disease. Drugs you give to heathy people for decades are a huge Win-Win. And even vaccines represent a vast and stable market.
Sure, there are all sorts of rare diseases that could be cured, but there's no money to do the research. People have fundraisers to try to make it profitable, e.g. [1]
Well that's because the diseases are rare. Regardless of profit, it makes no sense to work on a drug that will save 20 lives, when you could work on one that saves 200 lives.
Another part of the problem is that the cost of getting drugs approved is ridiculously high.
Doubtful one person, but a board of directors choosing where to maintain, increase, or reduce investment does. And their legal fiduciary duty is to maximize profits. That is the system's design right there.
I would tone the statement down, but it's still true that the number one purpose of a for-profit business is to generate profit. All other activity, in general, is secondary to profit.
It's like saying a human doesn't need to eat. Sure, sometimes healthy people go without food to achieve a goal, and a few rare people sacrifice themselves for the common good. But these people are exceptions to the rule.
It might more profitable to find a cure, but often business is blinded by short term rather than the long game.
I don't think that's true at all. In the UK at least I believe there is some expectation that a limited company will return profits to shareholders, but besides that the shareholders and directors can set the priorities of the company to be anything they want.
If you know of anything to the contrary I would be very interested to hear it!
You could argue just as well that the number two purpose of an organization is to generate profit. Profit is a necessity to achieve your primary goals. People need to eat, but you'd have to be a pretty uninspired person if your number one purpose is meeting your caloric expenditures.
> 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.
I have no love for the pharmaceutical industry, but that logic is wrong for so many reasons.
1) Corporations on the public stock exchanges aren't constitutionally capable of maximizing profits with such long-term strategies. Stockholders want fat profits _now_, not a trickle of profits over decades. The industry is already high risk.
2) Because all the low-hanging fruit is gone, what big pharmaceuticals care about is stuffing their pipeline full of as many lottery tickets as possible. They don't have the luxury of only focusing on such narrow strategies as you describe; in order to hit the jackpot more often they need to play the field in all its dimensions. This shotgun approach is why we see so much less-than-revolutionary research. If companies only aimed for the stars (i.e. cures for high-profile diseases) all of them would quickly go bankrupt. They want scratch-offs in their pipeline, too, not only the Mega Millions.
3) For serious ailments the sick person isn't the consumer; the healthcare and insurance industries are the consumers. Substitutes are easier to find or develop for management/sustaining therapies, including none at all. And for such therapies, there's less pressure from the sick because such therapies are less high-profile. A possible cure? They'll be beating down their doctors' and insurers' doors.
4) As much as I hate patents, the effective patent life for a treatment is something like 15 years or less. Which means even if you could corner a market (and they sure do try), you only have 15 years maximum to dominate and reap huge profits, not a lifetime. Again, because it's easier to find alternatives and supplements to therapies like you describe, it's important to front-load as much profit as possible.
None of that is to say that there aren't pathological problems with the incentive structures driving the pharmaceutical and health therapy industries. Or that there aren't counter-veiling and counter-counter-veiling forces at play. But cynical, conspiratorial theories are really unhelpful. They're not realistic and ultimately rather fatalistic, I think.
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.
This has been commented on before here and elsewhere: the elimination of certain species of mosquitoes that seem to serve no ecological purpose other than spreading disease.
There may be political motivations/economic (Malarial drugs would plummet for example), but I think it goes further than just that.
We don't think there are any ecological purposes .. but spreading disease is a purpose. Animals that have been kept in check may explode. Human populations are already exploding.
Parts of this planet are in bad shape simply due to species introduction (Australian Camels is a good example). Other species have been introduced to solve the initial problem, only to create more problems.
I would like to see an end to these annoying insects too, but there could be unintended consequences. Those are legitimate concerns.
There have only been a handful of small-scale field studies conducted so far; whether it will "work" regionally and long-term is another matter. So while the idea looks promising, objectively speaking, it's still a work in progress.
Although I remember reading somewhere that mosquitos have a negative footprint on ecology. There's definitely a ton of research at the moment on mosquito control. There was another article on HN a few years ago on a device that tracks and kills mosquitos w/ tiny lasers that can't harm humans. Apologize for lack of source, I'll try and dig them up.
EDIT: found it! wasn't too hard to find haha. And it seems other replies have already provided source on mosquitos and their net benefit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser
Ecosystem does not care, it just is. So far it seems that humans are the only entities in the ecosystem that care. Hell, the "bad" and "good" state of the ecosystem is defined as its ability to support human life and growth.
> [...] 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...)
There is a method for doing this. I can't seem to find the original article where I heard about this, but it was tested in some remote area in Africa and had a 90% reduction in mosquito population with just one application. Here is a more updated Zika flavored article about the same technique:
I'm only aware of the test conducted in Brazil, which had a claimed 80% reduction rate:
Oxitec, which is owned by Maryland-based Intrexon Corporation, tested its mosquitoes in the small Brazilian city of Piracicaba and said the reduced the number of mosquito larvae by 80 percent in one area.
What I've read on the topic is that animals that eat mosquitos have lots of small flying insects to choose from if they disappear, so much so that you'd never notice the difference. Their role as pollinators is a bit more fraught but again there are still a few replacements standing by in pretty much every case.
Birds, insects, spiders, etc would probably benefit a lot more from humans no longer needing to spray insecticide to control mosquitoes.
And mosquitoes would still exist -- just not the species that are regionally eradicated because they spread diseases (and many of which are invasive species such as Aedes aegypti).
Other commenters have noted that there are enough replacements that these animals won't miss them. I'm curious, though, if the subsequent decrease in those species' populations (from making up a larger percentage of prey than when mosquitoes were available) would have negative effects.
Although he's missing references to the studies he mentioned, the point was animals that eat mosquitos would be fine without them, as they also eat other insects. Spiders come to mind.
Indeed. But I'm not derailing an entire conversation. The conversation has been derailed already. I'm just pointing out that these comments about hot button issues, that rehash the same stuff again and again, are annoying to some users, especially since they appear quite unpredictably.
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.
Fungal sexual reproduction has more than two mating types, as well, which is apparently made possible by handling the mitochondria differently from animals. In animals, the two parent cells fuse and the male's mitochondria is destroyed. In fungi, the nuclear material is transferred between cells, and incompatible mitochondria never occupy the same cell.
So a species could have one type or thousands of mating types, and may be homothallic or heterothallic. Meaning that individuals of the same type could be compatible, or not, respectively.
In a dimorphic animal species, if you wander the wild and encounter a random member of your species, it is about 50% likely you could reproduce. For some species of fungus, a random encounter could be as high as 99.999% likely to be compatible.
We don't even need to imagine aliens for this. We have species right here on Earth that are incredibly different from us, and also available to be studied.
> Many plants have two different generational types (haploid and diploid).
For the vast majority of plants, these are not physically separate organisms. The key difference here is that the haploid cells of the plant can themselves undergo mitosis, which animal gametes cannot do. Since we generally consider cells with different genetics to be different individuals, we speak of plants as having alternation of generations.
For the most part however, the haploid cells live in the diploid organism or vice versa, depending on which branch of the kingdom you're considering. It's not like botanists run tests on a particular specimen to determine its ploidy. For any given species, we know what the ploidy of the individual is. For example, flowering plants are all diploid. If you find a flowering plant, the individual has two sets of chromosomes, but somewhere in its tissues there is a haploid cell (descended from the parent) that is undergoing meiosis, and is thus a separate organism.
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.
That episode of STNG is about a virus which targets a specific DNA.
> In sickbay, Crusher reveals to Riker that Volnoth was killed by a microvirus. The interesting part was that the microvirus was specifically designed for a certain strain of DNA in Acamarians, approximately one in a million. Riker notes that this is unnatural, which leads Crusher to presume that Volnoth was murdered.
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.
That's where encoding in in RNA would be important, think about just a monotomically incrementing clock tick from one virus generation to the next, two cells would only merge if they had the same clock.
I basically know nothing about what's possible in RNA/DNA, but my understanding is that RNA can be used to adjust DNA, which could essentially increment a clock tick.
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.
Along with that, one of the reasons HIV is so hard to design a vaccine for is it's absurdly high error rate, which drives a huge amount of genetic diversity even within-host.
> 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.
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!