Prions Really Are Terrifying

Instead of worrying about relationship drama, this person is lying awake contemplating the existential horror of misfolded proteins. Prions are legitimately nightmare fuel—they're not alive, can't be killed by normal sterilization, and they literally just touch other proteins and go "hey, fold wrong like me" and cause a chain reaction of protein misfolding. No DNA, no RNA, just pure chaotic evil in protein form. They cause diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and mad cow disease, turning your brain into literal Swiss cheese. You can autoclave them, hit them with UV radiation, douse them in formaldehyde, and these absolute units just shrug it off. The fact that a simple shape change in a protein can be infectious and 100% fatal is the kind of thing that keeps molecular biologists up at night. So yeah, totally normal bedtime thoughts.