Global weight of all active SARS-CoV-2 viruses is between 0.1 and 10 kilograms.

 

A combined team of researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and the California Institute of Technology in the U.S. has calculated the weight of all the SARS-CoV-2 viruses infecting people around the world at any given time. 

 

Phys.org:
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-global-weight-sars-cov-viruses-kilograms.html

 

An interesting factoid...the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki contained less fissile plutonium.

Edited June 11, 20215 yr by Pattaya Spotter

interesting, that as little as 100g of substance can affect tens of millions people worldwide, but 100x difference in results is huge in science

Edited June 11, 20215 yr by internationalism

I'm a big fan of pointless information!

Wow.  

So they are saying viruses are small.

Really small, maybe even tiny.

Wow.

But it is kinda interesting.

On 6/11/2021 at 1:10 PM, internationalism said:

interesting, that as little as 100g of substance can affect tens of millions people worldwide, but 100x difference in results is huge in science

Not a lot of people know that

On 6/11/2021 at 1:16 PM, Emdog said:

I'm a big fan of pointless information!

In that case just for you;????

 

Spider flatulence is an oddly understudied topic in scientific literature, but we can look to their digestive system for some clues. Spiders do the vast majority of digestion outside their body, injecting their prey with venom from their fangs before ejecting sputum, full of digestive enzymes, from their mouths, through the fang holes and into the body of their prey. They then wait while the digestive juices break down tissues inside the exoskeleton  or, in some cases, skin of their prey. Spiders will then suck up the liquidy goodness into their mouths and stomachs, then they regurgitate it and eat it again. This happens a number of times, as spider digestive systems can only handle liquids—which means no lumps! It would seem likely that spiders ingest air during this process—one of the key elements needed for a fart.

Once they have extracted all the nutrients, in an organ called the ceaca, the food passes to the stercoral sac, where the moisture is extracted before anything left over is excreted through the anus as waste. Since the stercoral sac contains bacteria, which helps break down the spider’s food, it seems likely that gas is produced during this process, and therefore there is certainly the possibility that spiders do fart. No work has been done to verify this to date, however, so the truth remains a mystery until urgently needed research funding is allocated.