Eli5: what exactly is a virus and are viruses alive?
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A virus is a strand of information that infects a host and causes the host to reproduce and spread that information. In the case of a biological virus, the information is DNA, but there are other kinds of viruses which exist in other media, such as memes and computer viruses.
There is some debate about if viruses are alive and I am firmly in the camp that they are not. A key element of being alive is processing the local environment to stay alive; You know: eating, drinking, breathing, photosynthesis, etc. Virus are fundamentally unable to do that even when they are in a biological media.
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