Plagues

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Giant Frankenstein-like virus discovered in Austrian sewage plant

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Fri, 07 Apr 2017 07:11 UTC

© F. Schultz, et al., Science 356, 6333 (7 APRIL 2017) AAS
Researchers detected this giant virus particle in Austrian sewage.

New giant viruses found at an Austrian wastewater treatment plant probably evolved from a smaller virus that picked up bits of genome from its hosts and incorporated it, Frankenstein-like, into its own genetic code.

The viruses — four species in a new group dubbed the Klosneuviruses — are a type of Mimivirus. The giant viruses in the Mimivirus group were discovered just in 2003. Giant viruses live up to their name: They can reach sizes of up to 500 nanometers in diameter, compared to a few dozen nanometers for typical viruses. Giant viruses also have more complicated genetic machinery than their tinier cousins.

One of the new Klosneuviruses, for example, is so big that it carries transfer ribonucleic acids (tRNA) that can translate the genetic code for 19 out of the 20 protein-building amino acids found in nature. (Translation is part of the process in which a gene's instructions are decoded and carried out. Viruses use tRNA in their replication process, but not all of them have their own tRNA; some hijack their hosts'.) That's impressive, even for a giant virus, scientists led by Tanja Woyke of the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute reported April 6 in the journal Science.

MERS coronavirus emerges in Saudi Arabia hospital; 10 infected

Tom Miles
WHTC
Tue, 04 Apr 2017 07:42 UTC

Ten people have caught the MERS coronavirus after an outbreak in a haemodialysis unit in a hospital in Saudi Arabia, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday, without giving details of how the virus was able to spread within the hospital.

The potentially fatal Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) is thought to be carried by camels and comes from the same family as the coronavirus that caused China's deadly Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003.

Since MERS emerged in September 2012, 1,935 cases have been confirmed and there have been at least 690 related deaths, WHO said.

The latest outbreak, at Wadi al-Dawasir in Riyadh province, began at the end of February, when a 32-year-old woman and a 31-year-old man showed symptoms. They were hospitalized in the first few days of March, and both were confirmed to have MERS on March 4.

Contact tracing found eight symptomatic and two asymptomatic cases. Two of those infected were health workers, WHO said.

None of the patients in the outbreak has yet died, WHO said, although MERS generally kills about 36 percent of sufferers.

Most of the known human-to-human transmission has occurred in health care settings, and the WHO has said hospitals and medical workers should take stringent precautions as a standard measure to stop the disease spreading.

Bumper crop of acorns could put U.S. on brink of Lyme disease epidemic

Lia Eustachewich
New York Post
Tue, 04 Apr 2017 11:30 UTC

A bumper crop of acorns could be putting the US on the brink of an unprecedented outbreak of Lyme disease, experts warn.

An estimated 300,000 Americans are diagnosed with Lyme disease each year, but the illness is now on track to being the worst in 2017, according to Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York.

The acorn surge means mouse populations will climb — giving rise to more disease-carrying ticks.

"We predict the mice population based on the acorns and we predict infected nymph ticks with the mice numbers. Each step has a one-year lag," Ostfeld told New Scientist magazine.

One mouse alone can carry hundreds of immature ticks, according New Scientist.

The rodents' blood contains the Lyme-causing bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, which gets transferred to the tick's stomach as it feeds. The bacteria can then be passed on to whatever new host — like humans — the tick latches onto.

Comment: See also:

DARPA aims to develop platform to stop spread of pandemic in 60 days

darpa.mil
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 16:38 UTC

Over the past several years, DARPA-funded researchers have pioneered RNA vaccine technology, a medical countermeasure against infectious diseases that uses coded genetic constructs to stimulate production of viral proteins in the body, which in turn can trigger a protective antibody response. As a follow-on effort, DARPA funded research into genetic constructs that can directly stimulate production of antibodies in the body.1,2

DARPA is now launching the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program, aimed at developing that foundational work into an entire system capable of halting the spread of any viral disease outbreak before it can escalate to pandemic status. Such a capability would offer a stark contrast to the state of the art for developing and deploying traditional vaccines—a process that does not deliver treatments to patients until months, years, or even decades after a viral threat emerges.

"DARPA's goal is to create a technology platform that can place a protective treatment into health providers' hands within 60 days of a pathogen being identified, and have that treatment induce protection in patients within three days of administration. We need to be able to move at this speed considering how quickly outbreaks can get out of control," said Matt Hepburn, the P3 Program Manager. "The technology needs to work on any viral disease, whether it's one humans have faced before or not."

Recent outbreaks of viral infectious diseases such as Zika, H1N1 influenza, and Ebola have cast into sharp relief the inability of the global health system to rapidly contain the spread of a disease using existing tools and procedures. State-of-the-art medical countermeasures typically take many months or even years to develop, produce, distribute, and administer. These solutions often arrive too late—if at all—and in quantities too small to respond to emerging threats. In contrast, the envisioned P3 platform would cut response time to weeks and stay within the window of relevance for containing an outbreak.

New lethal virus causing mass mortality in amphibian species in Portugal

Eva Rodríguez Nieto
Phys.org
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00 UTC

© Goncalo M. Rosa
Common midwife toad metamorphic forms and larvae in the Serra de Estrela, infected simultaneously by chytrid fungi and ranavirus.

A new strain of ranavirus is currently causing mass mortality in several species of amphibian in the Serra da Estrela, the highest mountain range in continental Portugal. This infectious agent is hypervirulent and also affects fish and reptiles, which complicates the situation, according to a study boasting the collaboration of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.

An emerging virus is affecting amphibian populations in Portugal, but this is not the first time amphibians have been a source of worry in the country. In 2009, hundreds of midwife toads (Alytes obstetricans) were found dead in Serra da Estrela Natural Park.

A research study published in the journal Scientific Reports raises a new alert on this genus of virus, which has also been discovered in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. As Jaime Bosch, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural Sciences and co-author of the study, tells SINC: "Ranaviruses have been known about for a long time, although in recent years globalisation is setting off mass mortalities throughout the world, and new strains also keep appearing, probably from Asia."

DARPA scientists working to engineer cells to eat deadly bacteria

Carrie Wells
Baltimore Sun
Mon, 27 Feb 2017 14:27 UTC

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University are working to engineer single-cell organisms that will seek out and eat bacteria that are deadly to humans.

Their work combines the fields of biology and engineering in an emerging discipline known as synthetic biology.

Although the work is still in its infancy, the researchers' engineered amoeba cells could be unleashed one day in hospitals to kill Legionella, the bacteria that cause Legionnaire's disease, a type of pneumonia; or Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a dangerous, drug-resistant bacteria associated with various infections and other life-threatening medical conditions in hospital patients.

Because amoeba are able to travel on their own over surfaces, the engineered cells also could be used to clean soil of bacterial contaminants, or even destroy microbes living on medical instruments. If the scientists are successful at making the cells perform tasks, it also could have important implications for research into cancer and other diseases.

"We're using this as a test bed for determining do we understand how cells work to the point where we can engineer them to perform certain tasks," said Douglas N. Robinson, a professor of cell biology and a member of the Hopkins team. "It's an opportunity to demonstrate that we understand what we think we understand. I think it's an opportunity to push what we're doing scientifically to another level."

The five-member team's work began in October after it received a four-year, $5.7 million federal contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA.

Shock finding: P-T mass extinction was due to an ice age

Anthony Watts
Watts Up with That
Mon, 06 Mar 2017 18:24 UTC

From the UNIVERSITÉ DE GENÈVE

The cold exterminated all of them

Through age determinations that are using the radioactive decay of uranium,scientists have discovered that one of the greatest mass extinctions was due to an ice age and not to a warming of Earth temperature.

© H. Bucher, Zürich
Permian-Triassic boundary in shallow marine sediments, characterised by a significant sedimentation gap between the black shales of Permian and dolomites of Triassic age. This gap documents a globally recognized regression phase, probably linked to a period of a cold climate and glaciation.

The Earth has known several mass extinctions over the course of its history. One of the most important happened at the Permian-Triassic boundary 250 million years ago. Over 95% of marine species disappeared and, up until now, scientists have linked this extinction to a significant rise in Earth temperatures. But researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, working alongside the University of Zurich, discovered that this extinction took place during a short ice age which preceded the global climate warming. It's the first time that the various stages of a mass extinction have been accurately understood and that scientists have been able to assess the major role played by volcanic explosions in these climate processes. This research, which can be read in Scientific Reports, completely calls into question the scientific theories regarding these phenomena, founded on the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, and paves the way for a new vision of the Earth's climate history.

Teams of researchers led by Professor Urs Schaltegger from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Faculty of Science of the UNIGE and by Hugo Bucher, from the University of Zürich, have been working on absolute dating for many years. They work on determining the age of minerals in volcanic ash, which establishes a precise and detailed chronology of the earth's climate evolution. They became interested in the Permian-Triassic boundary, 250 million years ago, during which one of the greatest mass extinctions ever took place, responsible for the loss of 95% of marine species. How did this happen? for how long marine biodiversity stayed at very low levels ?

Drug resistance? Primary malaria treatment fails to cure 4 patients in the UK

RT
Tue, 31 Jan 2017 17:15 UTC

A key malaria treatment has failed for the first time, prompting scientists to fear the disease could be becoming resistant to the primary drugs used to counter it. The failure occurred in four patients being treated in the UK for an African strain of the mosquito-borne condition.

A team of medics from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said it's still too early to say for sure that they had found a dangerous level of resistance, but called for further investigation. The results were reported in the Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy Journal after being carried out in late 2016.

"It's remarkable there's been four apparent failures of treatment, there's not been any other published account [in the UK]," Dr Colin Sutherland told the BBC on Tuesday. Although the evidence is not yet conclusive, there are signs the strain is learning to fight back.

"It does feel like something is changing, but we're not yet in a crisis. It is an early sign and we need to take it quite seriously as it may be snowballing into something with greater impact," he said.

Earth 'overdue' for magnetic pole reversal

Andrew Follett
The Daily Caller
Mon, 30 Jan 2017 10:49 UTC

Earth's magnetic field may be about to reverse, which could have devastating consequences for humanity.

Scientists think that Earth is long "overdue" for a full magnetic reversal and have determined that the magnetic field's strength is already declining by 5 percent each century. This suggests that a fully reversal is highly probable within the next 2,000 years

Earth's magnetic field surrounds the planet and deflects charged particles from the sun away, protecting life from harmful radiation. There have been at least several hundred global magnetic reversals throughout Earth's history, during which the north and south magnetic poles swap. The most recent of these occurred 41,000 years ago.

During the reversal, the planet's magnetic field will weaken, allowing heightened levels of radiation on and above the Earth's surface.

The radiation spike would cause enormous problems for satellites, aviation, and the power grid. Such a reversal would be comparable to major geomagnetic storms from the sun.

The sun last produced such a storm that struck Earth during the summer of 1859, creating the largest geomagnetic storm on record. The storm was so powerful that it caused telegraph machines around the world to spark, shocking operators and setting papers ablaze. The event released the same amount of energy as 10 billion atomic bombs.

Researchers estimate that a similar event today would cause $600 billion to $2.6 trillion in damages to the U.S. alone. National Geographic found that a similar event today would destroy much of the internet, take down all satellite communications, and almost certainly knock out most of the global electrical grid. The Earth would only get about 20 hours of warning. Other estimates place the damage at roughly $40 billion a day.

A similar solar event occurred in 2012, but missed Earth.

Ice age cycles linked to orbital periods and sea ice

Anthony Watts
Watts up with That
Fri, 27 Jan 2017 19:31 UTC

© Jung-Eun Lee/Brown University
The Southern Hemisphere has a higher capacity to grow sea ice than the Northern Hemisphere, where continents block growth. New research shows that the expansion of Southern Hemisphere sea ice during certain periods in Earth’s orbital cycles can control the pace of the planet’s ice ages.

Providence, R.I. — Earth is currently in what climatologists call an interglacial period, a warm pulse between long, cold ice ages when glaciers dominate our planet's higher latitudes. For the past million years, these glacial-interglacial cycles have repeated roughly on a 100,000-year cycle. Now a team of Brown University researchers has a new explanation for that timing and why the cycle was different before a million years ago.

Using a set of computer simulations, the researchers show that two periodic variations in Earth's orbit combine on a 100,000-year cycle to cause an expansion of sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere. Compared to open ocean waters, that ice reflects more of the sun's rays back into space, substantially reducing the amount of solar energy the planet absorbs. As a result, global temperature cools.

"The 100,000-year pace of glacial-interglacial periods has been difficult to explain," said Jung-Eun Lee, an assistant professor in Brown's Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Studies and the study's lead author. "What we were able to show is the importance of sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere along with orbital forcings in setting the pace for the glacial-interglacial cycle."

The research is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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The UK public voted. The majority of those who bothered to vote, voted for the UK to leave the European union, end of story.

Winternights2

The jews are the people that don't belong in the middle east. Remove them.

sbc

This is nothing new, the EU, has always demanded a second referendum, to make sure the population votes the right way, Ireland comes to mind. Vote...

Joan

And the supreme Oscar goes to the US, nominated by John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, the thing is that the Oscar is invisible, the only ones that are...

Joan

Facts don't matter .. what the authorities say is the "truth" regardless of facts is this any difference to what we "saw" in Chernobly ......

HashAttack2

Plagues

Giant Frankenstein-like virus discovered in Austrian sewage plant

MERS coronavirus emerges in Saudi Arabia hospital; 10 infected

Bumper crop of acorns could put U.S. on brink of Lyme disease epidemic

DARPA aims to develop platform to stop spread of pandemic in 60 days

New lethal virus causing mass mortality in amphibian species in Portugal

DARPA scientists working to engineer cells to eat deadly bacteria

Shock finding: P-T mass extinction was due to an ice age

Drug resistance? Primary malaria treatment fails to cure 4 patients in the UK

Earth 'overdue' for magnetic pole reversal

Ice age cycles linked to orbital periods and sea ice

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