Scientists have discovered the first virovore – an organism that eats viruses
I enjoyed reading this article, which gives a glimpse of the life of "wet science" researchers and the two phases - in vitro vs. in vivo (cf. the last sentence).The fact that a virus can be nutrition is an effect of it being part of the physical world: "it's made of stuff". Computer viruses, in contrast, are pure information, hence their ingredients cannot be eaten.Viruses are interesting because they are not alive, yet they replicate, which is at least one property of life forms; they are physically encoded information in a crystal hull.The peer review process, which is being debated here, is a bit like UNIX: some of it sucks but half a century later we still haven't come up with anything better or nearly as good. Peer review is important, and I'm concerned about the floods of pre-prints that are often cited as if they were (already) scientific publications - many will never be. What would help to take out sloppiness, nastiness and generally poor quality in peer reviews is if journals also always had meta-reviewers (reviewers that review the reviews) like the computer science conference do that I publish in. One might say that is the role of the editor, but I see the editor more as a Program Committee Chair, higher-level role. A paper rejected by all reviewers unisono would be rejected, a paper accepted by most reviewers would be rejected and papers with controversial reviews could go up to the editor after potential adding another reviewer first, who could be tasked to address specifically disagreements. Reviewing should be part of postgraduate education (I teach my doctoral candidates how to do it), but almost nowhere is, so there are many sub-par reviews by people who are not mentored properly. Overzealous reviews often come from younger postdocs or first-year PhD students, whereas older faculty members tend to be more generous, IMHO.