Solved cryptogram
An antibiotic will not touch a cold or the flu. Those are viruses, and it has no grip on them.
Biology Facts, sourced to MedlinePlus.
Solve it yourself
This fact is a cryptogram here: 72 letters over 20 different ones, graded medium.
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What it means
Antibiotics attack machinery that bacteria have and human cells do not: a cell wall to build, a ribosome of a particular shape, a way of copying a loop of DNA. A virus has none of that. It is a set of instructions in a coat, and it borrows the machinery of your own cells, so there is nothing to attack that is not also yours. Taking one anyway does nothing for the illness and helps breed resistant bacteria for later.
The claim comes from MedlinePlus.
- SourceMedlinePlus
- CollectionBiology Facts
- Difficultymedium
- Length72 letters, 20 of them different
Nearby in the collection
The facts either side of this one.
- NCBI Bookshelf: Molecular Biology of the Cellmedium, 74 letters
- NCBI Bookshelf: Molecular Biology of the Cellmedium, 75 letters
- MedlinePluseasy, 71 letters
- MedlinePlus, National Library of Medicinemedium, 70 letters
About as hard as this one
Scored closest to it by the model behind our guide to solving cryptograms.
- PLOS Biologymedium, 75 letters
- NIAMShard, 76 letters
- National Human Genome Research Institutehard, 67 letters
- MedlinePlushard, 75 letters