Filmmaker David Hoffman shares footage from his feature-length documentary Sputnik Mania, which shows how the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to both the space race and the arms race -- and jump-started science and math education around the world.
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tags: virology, mimivirus, sputnik,
Viruses may cause disease but some can fall ill themselves.
Just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. The misfit becomes the average. The Pluto-like objects are more typical in our solar system than the nearby planets we first knew.” -Alan Stern
Welcome to the world of virophage--viruses that parasitize other viruses. What's interesting is that the 'host' viruses are the megaviruses which are visible with light microscopy and which have genomes that can be larger than some bacteria. From Science:
The new science books started to flow into the schools when I was still in grammar school. By the time I got to high school in the middle 1960s and took physics, my text was the state-of-the-art PSSC book. It was eye-popping. There was also a rival series of texts pouring out of Berkeley. The saber-rattling was a dismaying element of the Space Age, but the impact on the math and science classrooms turned school into a garden of earthly delights for kids like me. I guess I owe a lot to those Sputnik-launching commies...