Slashdot Mirror
Dormant Diseases Frozen In the Ice Are Waking Up (bbc.co.uk)
boley1 writes: Like a plot from a Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) movie, evil is waking up as permafrost melts due to weather or natural, man-made, local, and/or global climate change. (Take your pick of any or all -- doesn't matter -- the plot and result is roughly the same.) According the the BBC, a 12-year-old boy died and at least twenty people were hospitalized after being infected by a disease (anthrax) that lay buried in the ice for 75 years. "The theory is that, over 75 years ago, a reindeer infected with anthrax died and its frozen carcass became trapped under a layer of frozen soil, known as permafrost," reports BBC. "There it stayed until a heatwave in the summer of 2016, when the permafrost thawed." In this case, bringing back the disease was accidental, but the story goes on to give examples of scientists (no indication of whether they are mad or not) purposefully seeing what ancient bacteria and virus they can resurrect from the ice. How many more diseases are lurking in the ice? Will The Andromeda Strain be released by meddling scientists or global warming?
Now do methane, which is clearly the bigger danger
You know.. thank you.. I don't really understand your Congress, or your system of checks and balances.. because, as I said during the campaign - I'm just a caveman!
Change it to a slum-lord instead of a lawyer and you have our current president.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's amazing what the past held. Inside the human genome lies, snipped into three separated pieces so it cannot become active the full dna of a virus. An ancient virus - very ancient because it appears to have no living relatives. But what we know about it suggests that, when this virus was active, it may well have been one of the deadliest virusses to ever exist. We know that because it is capable of completely and utterly masking itself from the human immune system. That's why it's there actually - we couldn't survive without it. The genes from that virus are uses by human fetuses to hide from their mother's immune system and avoid being attacked as foreign DNA. This also suggests that it exists throughout the mammal line and has been around as long as internal-birth. Perhaps it was acquired soon after in an evolutionary step that made internal-birth much more reliable, or perhaps it was already there and when the womb-mutation occurred it was easy for evolution to grab it as a solution. The cut up and neutralized virus was probably present in morganocodontid (the first known mammal - from the late Jurassic) but the plague could well have been around much earlier. It could have been plaguing dinosaurs, or even their predecessors.
Now imagine if that thing was reconstituted and escaped today... a virus no immune system can even see let alone develop a response to. Impossible to vaccinate again, impossible to defend against - even anti-virals may not work on it.
And this plague of plagues... is kept like the pieces of a museum fossil in every cell in your body right now.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *