Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Entirely New Class of Life Has Been Found in The Human Digestive System (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Peering into the jungle of microbes that live within us, researchers have stumbled across what seem to be an entire new class of virus-like objects. "It's insane," says University of North Carolina cell biologist Mark Peifer, who was not involved in the study, told Elizabeth Pennisi at Science Magazine. "The more we look, the more crazy things we see." These mysterious bits of genetic material have no detectable sequences or even structural similarities known to any other biological agents.

So Stanford University biologist Ivan Zheludev and colleagues argue their strange discovery may not be viruses at all, but instead an entirely new group of entities that may help bridge the ancient gap between the simplest genetic molecules and more complex viruses. "Obelisks comprise a class of diverse RNAs that have colonized, and gone unnoticed in, human, and global microbiomes," the researchers write in a preprint paper. Named after the highly-symmetrical, rod-like structures formed by its twisted lengths of RNA, the Obelisks' genetic sequences are only around 1,000 characters (nucleotides) in size. In fact, this brevity is likely one of the reasons we've failed to notice them previously.

In a study that has yet to be peer reviewed, Zheludev and team searched 5.4 million datasets of published genetic sequences and identified almost 30,000 different Obelisks. They appeared in about 10 percent of the human microbiomes the team examined. In one set of data, Obelisks turned up in 50 percent of the patients' oral samples. What's more, different types of Obelisks appear to be present in different areas of our bodies. "[This] supports the notion that Obelisks might include colonists of said human microbiomes," the researchers explain. They managed to isolate one type of host cell from our microbiome, the bacterium Streptococcus sanguinis – a common human mouth microbe. The Obelisk in these microbes had a loop 1,137 nucleotides long. "While we don't know the 'hosts' of other Obelisks," write Zheludev and colleagues. "it is reasonable to assume that at least a fraction may be present in bacteria." The question of the Obelisks' source aside, all seem to include codes for a new class of protein the researchers have named Oblins.

Comment Re:Double down on ignoring civics (Score 1) 167

by ScentCone (#64087479) Attached to: Elon Musk Is Funding a New School In Austin, Texas

Efforts to enhance STEM education have been to the detriment of basic civics instruction.

No, aggressively dismissing civics instruction as being some sort of celebration of evil white colonialist suppression and thus vilifying things like the Constitution are what have been a detriment to civics instruction.

No surprise that Musk the autocrat lover is in on this.

The continual projection of "look! an autocrat!" at the guy who's spent billions to free, for example, a platform like Twitter from unconstitutionally autocratic censorship would be starting to get funny if it didn't betray such a profoundly inverse understanding of the topic.

Comment Re:Obe problem for Musk: (Score 1, Insightful) 167

by ScentCone (#64087465) Attached to: Elon Musk Is Funding a New School In Austin, Texas

intelligent people tend to be liberal.

No, intelligent people are more likely to go to college. And colleges have been administratively occupied by (now) at least two generations of lefties cultivated by the aging hippies from the 1960s. The schools they run become progressive cultural echo chambers, churning out more of the same. If by "liberal" you mean it in the classic sense (liberty-minded), then you're right. But there is nothing liberty-minded about the contemporary liberal (as that term is now used) contingent running education in K-through-PhD. The opposite.

Submission + - Researchers find abundance of Helium in Baffin Island in Canada (nature.com)

Submitted by thepacketmaster
thepacketmaster writes: Documented in a recent Nature journal, researchers have found an abundance of both helium-4 and helium-3 trapped in the volcanic rocks on Baffin Island.

As the Earth formed, it is thought that helium-4 and helium-3 flowing on the solar wind became trapped in the minerals of the cooling planet. With heavier elements and minerals sinking to the bottom, this trapped helium was transported to the core, where it would have remained locked in its original forms.

Earth isn't massive enough to hold on to helium in any significant quantities, though. Any that did not get trapped, or that was subsequently released when the minerals melted in the mantle or due to massive impacts, would have eventually seeped up to the surface and floated off into space. So, helium is relatively rare on Earth, and helium-3 is even more so.

Slashdot Top Deals

When it is incorrect, it is, at least *authoritatively* incorrect. -- Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy

Close