Because they rely on hosts for a majority of functions, viruses aren’t considered alive. But entities like this one complicate matters.
Archea has some weird ‘critters’ in it, that much is for certain.
A cellular entity retaining only its replicative core: Hidden archaeal lineage with an ultra-reduced genome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.02.651781v1
note: biorxiv.org is a pre-print server. this paper has not made it thru the review process, as yet.
I wonder if this is a single cell bacteria in the process of becoming a virus? This could be an important evolutionary link to how viruses come about.
It’s an archaeon, not a bacterium. But that’s one hypothesis, yes. The scientists themselves don’t want to make that claim yet. https://www.science.org/content/article/microbe-bizarrely-tiny-genome-may-be-evolving-virus
By Sigmar’s grace, better summon the elector counts!
Or a kind of proto-cell.
It seems obvious to me that if our taxonomy fails to describe the natural world, then our definition of life is inadequate. Viruses being “not alive” because semantics has bugged me since the 7th grade.
Reminds me of myself as a teenager
It’s PopMech. It’s always been a rag, not something to be taken seriously. Maybe in the 1960s.