4 ms·

I'd have hoped for a proofread by someone qualified, but even the media tend to get this right.

• waps 14y ago
  For that matter, a magnification of the viruses wouldn't actually look like that eather. The potrusions that are displayed are lacking. For starters, they're only showing the ones relevant for research, and second the structures on their surfaces are displayed massively bigger than they really are. Aside from bacteriophages, pretty much every virus is going to look like a perfect circle with small irregularities on it's surface that are barely visible. Bacteria are the same. There's only a few looks, cylindrical (bacili), round (cocci), round but irregular (stafylococcus), and a few others (rounded cylindrical, snake-like and formless that are less important because they're not the cause of major illnesses). Btw: if you want to have a more realistic view of how much we actually know about bacteria, analyse the real meaning of MRSA (Methycilin resistant staphylococcus aureus = "grape shaped thing that only slows growth when dipped in methycilin". Needless to say, this is in practice several thousand different bacteria species). And about viruses, we know much, much less. Gives you some more respect for medical research and just how much they're shooting in the dark, and how much data they have to process on every trial.