Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about strange viruses discovered in a Boston forest
Aug 7, 2023 #virus#boston#virology
0:00 Intro to new discovery 1:45 Previous discoveries about giant viruses 3:30 DNA and mystery of its size 4:15 New study discovers incredible diversity 5:10 Geometry of capsids 5:30 Strange features: Gorgon, turtle, stars, hair and supernova 7:15 New type of viruses?
In what seems like a plot straight out of a low-budget science-fiction film, scientists have revived a giant virus that was buried in Siberian ice for 30,000 years — and it is still infectious. Its targets, fortunately, are amoebae, but the researchers suggest that as Earth’s ice melts, this could trigger the return of other ancient viruses, with potential risks for human health.
This guy is 150 times less compacted than any bacteriophage. We don’t understand anything anymore!
The newly thawed virus is the biggest one ever found. At 1.5 micrometres long, it is comparable in size to a small bacterium. Evolutionary biologists Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel, the husband-and-wife team at Aix-Marseille University in France who led the work, named it Pithovirus sibericum, inspired by … "
On a related note, saw this cool short talk by Michael Levin - it all fits into this Earth Centrist paradigm quite well.
PZ Meyers gave a speech at Skepticon a few year ago. Like there are bad viruses and bacteria, there are good ones too. The human body is covered in both and the body needs the good ones to fight the bad ones.
Indeed and we can only marvel at the pace of discovery and the new layers of reality scientists are able to define.
I’ve loved that imaging, though recently my appreciation has been rattled to its foundation,
though subsequently that foundation has been reassembled into a stronger more realistic appreciation.
Sort of like abandoning the atomic solar system model with it vast emptiness with the reality that an atom is all about Covalence shells, that are anything but empty space.
I tip my hat to my latest scientific hero Jake Brown creator of SubAnima
A few years ago Veritasium posted a video portraying ‘molecular machines’. But is that really the right way to think about the inner workings of our cells? Are we all just running on molecular clockwork?
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Here’s another breaking story
The microbial environment is totally different
“We spend so much time trying to imagine alien worlds,” says Keeling. “There’s one right under our noses, more weird than anything we can think of.”
He’s not being theatrical. Consider the way specks of protist bodies experience water, for example. It’s radically different from the way giant lumbering humans and other macroscopic swimmers do. Lone cells are so tiny, the properties of plain water push them down evolutionary paths barely recognizable to us.
single-celled creature he collected from a pond rich in sphagnum moss in southern Germany. The shape-shifting amoebozoan cell, prowling for algal cells to attack, curls its long strand of a flagellum into an earringlike loop. Holding the loop steady, the cell somehow glides. Yet the loop doesn’t flick, lash or wave. “They look basically like tiny flying saucers,” Hess says.
Hess first collected the creatures, with no species name and a baffling form of locomotion, in 2010 and wondered for years how the locomotion worked. …
