No, this is not some philsophical treatise. Nature recently published a paper by a French team that discovered a virus that infects another virus. (You probably don’t have access to Nature either, but keep reading, there is hope.)
Wait a minute: Are viruses alive? They can’t reproduce on their own, so, some scientists argue, they are not really alive. Viruses infect living things. Well, then doesn’t a virus infecting a virus imply the host virus is alive?
What is life? Do we have to redefine it, once again, again?
It’s turtles, all the way down, for some of us — but you, Dear Reader, should probably read a good description of the paper, over at Living the Scientific Life.
Oh — the name of the new thing? It’s a satellite virus, sorta, and it looks right, so the team that discovered it calls it “Sputnik.”
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
With any luck, the turtles themselves will be alternating layers of chocolate, caramel and nuts.
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I don’t think it’s turtles all the way, gotta be elephants on the turtles, to separate the layers…
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