I wrote this 5 hours ago but didn't post it then...

[baratron]

OK, it transpires that I am not the only person geeky enough to consider the science of Pokemon. Notice the nasa.gov in the domain name there :p

I must admit to being wildly unconvinced by the virus page which starts off by talking about bacteria "and other microbes, such as viruses and fungi" living on a space station. As a later link says, scientists disagree about whether viruses are living or nonliving organisms, because they can't reproduce themselves. But hey.

I use Pokemon in teaching, sometimes. I explained the concept of earthing to one of my less-gifted students by reminding him that Electric attacks have no effect on Ground Pokemon - because they go to earth. He understands it, now.

Comments

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I got educated as an undergraduate with the whole "are viruses alive or not????" debate. I feel totally over it now. There's no abrupt boundary dividing "living thing" and "non-living thing", and viruses are part of the graduated zone between the two.

If there's no other (compatible) life around, viruses are effectively dead. But if there's life around for them to infect, you need to consider them a part of the living system.

And there certainly are viruses that infect bacteria and fungi, so I would expect them to be part of a space station's ecosystem.

Proving how much of a *%&@^# evolutionary biologist I am, "viruses, bacteria, protists, fungi" makes me cringe. Let's just lump together everything that isn't a plant or an animal. Clearly I should not be let near children; they're unlikely to learn much from me :-).