15-08-2021 om 18:49 geschreven door peter  

Do you get to a place where you feel that you live in an area that has trash left, right and center? You need a breath of fresh air, you need to get out of the city life filled with all types of hustling, bustling and garbage. Add this next list of places into your list of travel destinations. These places are surreal with clean air, magnificent scenery and clear blue skies.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

15-08-2021 om 18:41 geschreven door peter  

Most Dangerous Places on Earth

There are a few places on this green earth that you should not dare visit even if you get a free ticket and an all-expenses paid trip. Some of these are caves that will kill you in minutes, caves that will have your temperature at boiling point, radioactivity enough to melt you as well as rats that will give you plagues. This belief might make you put your passport very far away.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{  https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

31-07-2021 om 22:54 geschreven door peter  

The coronavirus sports a luxurious sugar coat. “It’s striking,” thought Rommie Amaro, staring at her computer simulation of one of the trademark spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2, which stick out from the virus’s surface. It was swathed in sugar molecules, known as glycans.

“When you see it with all the glycans, it’s almost unrecognizable,” says Amaro, a computational biophysical chemist at the University of California, San Diego.

Many viruses have glycans covering their outer proteins, camouflaging them from the human immune system like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But last year, Amaro’s laboratory group and collaborators created the most detailed visualization yet of this coat, based on structural and genetic data and rendered atom-by-atom by a supercomputer. On 22 March 2020, she posted the simulation to Twitter. Within an hour, one researcher asked in a comment: what was the naked, uncoated loop sticking out of the top of the protein?

Amaro had no idea. But ten minutes later, structural biologist Jason McLellan at the University of Texas at Austin chimed in: the uncoated loop was a receptor binding domain (RBD), one of three sections of the spike that bind to receptors on human cells (see ‘A hidden spike’).

In Amaro’s simulation, when the RBD lifted up above the glycan cloud, two glycans swooped in to lock it into place, like a kickstand on a bicycle. When Amaro mutated the glycans in the computer model, the RBD collapsed. McLellan’s team built a way to try the same experiment in the lab, and by June 2020, the collaborators had reported that mutating the two glycans reduced the ability of the spike protein to bind to a human cell receptor¹ — a role that no one has previously recognized in coronaviruses, McLellan says. It’s possible that snipping out those two sugars could reduce the virus’s infectivity, says Amaro, although researchers don’t yet have a way to do this.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have been developing a detailed understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 infects cells. By picking apart the infection process, they hope to find better ways to interrupt it through improved treatments and vaccines, and learn why the latest strains, such as the Delta variant, are more transmissible.

What has emerged from 19 months of work, backed by decades of coronavirus research, is a blow-by-blow account of how SARS-CoV-2 invades human cells (see ‘Life cycle of the pandemic coronavirus’). Scientists have discovered key adaptations that help the virus to grab on to human cells with surprising strength and then hide itself once inside. Later, as it leaves cells, SARS-CoV-2 executes a crucial processing step to prepare its particles for infecting even more human cells. These are some of the tools that have enabled the virus to spread so quickly and claim millions of lives. “That’s why it’s so difficult to control,” says Wendy Barclay, a virologist at Imperial College London.

Barbed and ready

It starts with the spikes. Each SARS-CoV-2 virion (virus particle) has an outer surface peppered with 24–40 haphazardly arranged spike proteins that are its key to fusing with human cells². For other types of virus, such as influenza, external fusion proteins are relatively rigid. SARS-CoV-2 spikes, however, are wildly flexible and hinge at three points, according to work published in August 2020 by biochemist Martin Beck at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany, and his colleagues³.

That allows the spikes to flop around, sway and rotate, which could make it easier for them to scan the cell surface and for multiple spikes to bind to a human cell. There are no similar experimental data for other coronaviruses, but because spike-protein sequences are highly evolutionarily conserved, it is fair to assume the trait is shared, says Beck.

Early in the pandemic, researchers confirmed that the RBDs of SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins attach to a familiar protein called the ACE2 receptor, which adorns the outside of most human throat and lung cells. This receptor is also the docking point for SARS-CoV, the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). But compared with SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 binds to ACE2 an estimated 2–4 times more strongly⁴, because several changes in the RBD stabilize its virus-binding hotspots⁵.

Worrying variants of SARS-CoV-2 tend to have mutations in the S1 subunit of the spike protein, which hosts the RBDs and is responsible for binding to the ACE2 receptor. (A second spike subunit, S2, prompts viral fusion with the host cell’s membrane.)

The Alpha variant, for example, includes ten changes in the spike-protein sequence, which result in RBDs being more likely to stay in the ‘up’ position⁶. “It is helping the virus along by making it easier to enter into cells,” says Priyamvada Acharya, a structural biologist at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute in Durham, North Carolina, who is studying the spike mutations.

The Delta variant, which is now spreading around the world, hosts multiple mutations in the S1 subunit, including three in the RBD that seem to improve the RBD’s ability to bind to ACE2 and evade the immune system⁷.

Restricted entry

Once the viral spikes bind to ACE2, other proteins on the host cell’s surface initiate a process that leads to the merging of viral and cell membranes (see ‘Viral entry up close’).

The virus that causes SARS, SARS-CoV, uses either of two host protease enzymes to break in: TMPRSS2 (pronounced ‘tempress two’) or cathepsin L. TMPRSS2 is the faster route in, but SARS-CoV often enters instead through an endosome — a lipid-surrounded bubble — which relies on cathepsin L. When virions enter cells by this route, however, antiviral proteins can trap them.

SARS-CoV-2 differs from SARS-CoV because it efficiently uses TMPRSS2, an enzyme found in high amounts on the outside of respiratory cells. First, TMPRSS2 cuts a site on the spike’s S2 subunit⁸. That cut exposes a run of hydrophobic amino acids that rapidly buries itself in the closest membrane — that of the host cell. Next, the extended spike folds back onto itself, like a zipper, forcing the viral and cell membranes to fuse.

The virus then ejects its genome directly into the cell. By invading in this spring-loaded manner, SARS-CoV-2 infects faster than SARS-CoV and avoids being trapped in endosomes, according to work published in April by Barclay and her colleagues at Imperial College London⁹.

The virus’s speedy entry using TMPRSS2 explains why the malaria drug chloroquine didn’t work in clinical trials as a COVID-19 treatment, despite early promising studies in the lab¹⁰. Those turned out to have used cells that rely exclusively on cathepsins for endosomal entry. “When the virus transmits and replicates in the human airway, it doesn’t use endosomes, so chloroquine, which is an endosomal disrupting drug, is not effective in real life,” says Barclay.

The discovery also points to protease inhibitors as a promising therapeutic option to prevent a virus from using TMPRSS2, cathepsin L or other proteases to enter host cells. One TMPRSS2 inhibitor, camostat mesylate, which is approved in Japan to treat pancreatitis, blocked viral entry into lung cells⁸, but the drug did not improve patients’ outcomes in an initial clinical trial¹¹.

“From my perspective, we should have such protease inhibitors as broad antivirals available to fight new disease outbreaks and prevent future pandemics at the very beginning,” says Stefan Pöhlmann, director of the Infection Biology Unit at the German Primate Center in Göttingen, who has led research on ACE2 binding and the TMPRSS2 pathway.

Deadly competition

The next steps of infection are murkier. “There are a lot more black boxes once you are inside the cell,” says chemist Janet Iwasa at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, who is developing an annotated animation of the viral life cycle. “There’s more uncertainty, and competing hypotheses.”

After the virus shoots its RNA genome into the cell, ribosomes in the cytoplasm translate two sections of viral RNA into long strings of amino acids, which are then snipped into 16 proteins, including many involved in RNA synthesis. Later, more RNAs are generated that code for a total of 26 known viral proteins, including structural ones used to make new virus particles, such as the spike, and other accessory proteins. In this way, the virus begins churning out copies of its own messenger RNA. But it needs the cell’s machinery to translate those mRNAs into proteins.

How a rampant coronavirus variant blunts our immune defences

Coronaviruses take over that machinery in many ways. Virologist Noam Stern-Ginossar and her team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, zoomed in on three mechanisms by which SARS-CoV-2 suppresses the translation of host mRNA in favour of its own. None are exclusive to this virus, but the combination, speed and magnitude of the effects seem unique, says Stern-Ginossar.

First, the virus eliminates the competition: viral protein Nsp1, one of the first proteins translated when the virus arrives, recruits host proteins to systematically chop up all cellular mRNAs that don’t have a viral tag. When Stern-Ginossar’s team put that same tag on the end of a host mRNA, the mRNA was not chopped up¹².

Second, infection reduces overall protein translation in the cell by 70%. Nsp1 is again the main culprit, this time physically blocking the entry channel of ribosomes so mRNA can’t get inside, according to work from two research teams^13,14. The little translation capacity that remains is dedicated to viral RNAs, says Stern-Ginossar.

Finally, the virus shuts down the cell’s alarm system. This happens in numerous ways, but Stern-Ginossar’s team identified one clear mechanism for SARS-CoV-2: the virus prevents cellular mRNA from getting out of the nucleus, including instructions for proteins meant to alert the immune system to infection. A second team confirmed this finding, and again pointed to Nsp1: the protein seems to jam up exit channels in the nucleus so nothing can escape¹⁵.

Because gene transcripts can’t get out of the nucleus, the infected cells don’t release many interferons — these are signalling proteins that alert the immune system to the presence of a virus. SARS-Cov-2 is particularly efficient at shutting down this alarm system: compared with other respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV and respiratory syncytial virus, SARS-CoV-2 infection induces significantly lower levels of interferons¹⁶. And this June, researchers reported mutations in the Alpha variant that seem to enable it to subdue interferon production even more efficiently¹⁷.

“It’s clear that SARS-CoV-2 is a very fast virus that has a unique ability to prevent our immune system from recognizing and combating infection in the first stages,” says Stern-Ginossar. By the time the immune system does realize there is a virus, there is so much of it that immune-response proteins sometimes flood the bloodstream at a faster rate than normal — which can cause damage. Doctors saw early in the pandemic that some people with COVID-19 who become very ill are harmed by an overactive immune response to SARS-CoV-2, as well as by the virus itself. Some proven treatments work by dampening down this immune response.

Renovation station

Once the virus has taken over host translation, it starts a home makeover, extensively remodelling the interior and exterior of the cell to its needs.

First, some of the newly made viral spike proteins travel to the surface of the cell and poke out of the host-cell membrane. There, they activate a host calcium-ion channel, which expels a fatty coating onto the outside of the cell — the same coating found on cells that naturally fuse together, such as muscle cells. At this point, the infected cell fuses to neighbouring cells expressing ACE2, developing into massive individual respiratory cells filled with up to 20 nuclei.

These fused structures, called syncytia, are induced by viral infections such as HIV and herpes simplex virus, but not by the SARS virus, says molecular biologist Mauro Giacca at King’s College London, who led the team that published the finding in April¹⁸. He hypothesizes that forming syncytia allows infected cells to thrive for long periods of time, churning out more and more virions. “This is not a hit-and-run virus,” he says. “It persists.” A second team, led by researcher Qiang Sun at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing, found that some COVID-19-infected cells even form syncytia with lymphocytes — one of the body’s own immune cells¹⁹. This is a known mechanism of immune evasion by tumour cells, but not by viruses. It suggests that infected cells avoid immune detection by simply grabbing on to and merging with nearby immune scouts.

On the inside of the cell, even more change is occurring. Like other coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 transforms the long, thin endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a network of flat membranes involved in protein synthesis and transport, into double-membrane spheres, as if the ER were blowing bubbles. These double-membrane vesicles (DMVs) might provide a safe place for viral RNA to be replicated and translated, shielding it from innate immune sensors in the cell, but that hypothesis is still being investigated.

Proteins involved in making DMVs could be good drug targets, because they seem to be necessary for viral replication. For instance, a host protein, TMEM41B, is needed to mobilize cholesterol and other lipids to expand the ER membranes so that all the virus parts will fit inside²⁰. “When you take TMEM41B out, it has a major impact on infection,” says Vineet Menachery, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, who was involved in the research. The coronavirus transmembrane protein Nsp3 could also be a target: it creates a crown-like pore in the walls of the DMVs to shuttle out newly made viral RNA²¹.

Most viruses that have an outer wrapping, known as an envelope, form this feature by assembly directly at the edge of the cell, co-opting some of the cell’s own plasma membrane on their way out. But newly made coronavirus proteins take a different path.

For years, evidence has suggested that coronaviruses are transported out of the cell through the Golgi complex, an organelle that works like a post office, packaging molecules in membranes and sending them off to other parts of the cell. There, the virus forms a lipid envelope from the Golgi complex’s membrane; newly formed virions are then carried inside Golgi vesicles to the cell surface, where they are spat out of the cell, says virologist and cell biologist Carolyn Machamer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who has studied coronaviruses for 30 years.

But in December, cell biologist Nihal Altan-Bonnet at the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and her colleagues reported that they had detected coronaviruses leaving the cell through lysosomes — cellular rubbish bins full of enzymes that break down cell parts²². Blocking the Golgi-based secretory pathway didn’t seem to affect the amount of infectious virus being released, says Altan-Bonnet. Her team’s evidence²² suggests that viral proteins form an envelope by budding into the ER, then take over lysosomes to get out of the cell. The researchers are currently testing inhibitors that block the lysosomal exit process as potential antiviral candidates.

Leaving a cell through either the Golgi or lysosomes is slow and inefficient compared with budding out of a plasma membrane, so scientists don’t know why SARS-CoV-2 does it. Machamer suspects that the lipid composition of a Golgi- or lysosome-derived envelope is somehow more beneficial to the virus than one from the plasma membrane. “If we understood this part a little bit better, there would be great opportunities for novel antiviral therapeutics,” she says.

Last slice

On the way out of the cell, one more event makes this virus into an infectious juggernaut: a quick snip at a site of five amino acids prepares the virus to strike its next target.

Where other coronaviruses have a single arginine amino acid at the junction of the S1 and S2 subunits of the spike, SARS-CoV-2 has a line of five amino acids: proline, arginine, arginine, alanine and arginine. “Because the site was unusual, we focused on it, and it turned out that, yes, the site is essential for invasion of lung cells,” says Pöhlmann. In May 2020, he and his colleagues reported that a host-cell protein called furin recognizes and clips that string of amino acids — and the cut is “essential” for the virus to enter human lung cells efficiently²³.

It’s not the first time that researchers have identified a furin cleavage site on a virus; highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses also have it, says Barclay. When a colleague sent Barclay a strain of SARS-CoV-2 in culture that had spontaneously lost the furin cleavage site, her team found that ferrets infected with this strain shed viral particles in lower amounts than did those infected with the pandemic strain, and did not transmit the infection to nearby animals⁹. At the same time as Barclay’s team reported its results in a September 2020 preprint, a study in the Netherlands also found that coronavirus with an intact furin cleavage site enters human airway cells faster than do those without it²⁴.

Furin is suspected to cut the site at some point during virion assembly, or just before release. The timing might explain why the virus exits through the Golgi or lysosomes, says Tom Gallagher, a virologist at Loyola University Chicago in Illinois. “The virus, once assembled, moves into an organelle where it can be bathed in the presence of the furin protease.”

By snipping the bond between the S1 and S2 subunits, the furin cut loosens up virion spike proteins so that during cell entry they respond to a second cut by TMPRSS2, which exposes the hydrophobic area that rapidly buries itself in a host-cell membrane, says Gallagher. If spikes are not pre-clipped by furin —and they aren’t always — they bypass TMPRSS2, and enter through the slower endosomal pathway, if at all.

The race for antiviral drugs to beat COVID — and the next pandemic

Two coronavirus variants, Alpha and Delta, have altered furin cleavage sites. In the Alpha variant, the initial proline amino acid is changed to a histidine (P681H) ; in the Delta variant, it is changed to an arginine (P681R). Both changes make the sequence less acidic, and the more basic the string of amino acids, the more effectively furin recognizes and cuts it, says Barclay. “We would hypothesize that this is the virus getting even better at transmitting.”

More furin cuts mean more spike proteins primed to enter human cells. In SARS-CoV, less than 10% of spike proteins are primed, says Menachery, whose lab group has been quantifying the primed spike proteins but is yet to publish this work. In SARS-CoV-2, that percentage rises to 50%. In the Alpha variant, it’s more than 50%. In the highly transmissible Delta variant, the group has found, greater than 75% of spikes are primed to infect a human cell.

Known unknowns

The scientific community is still scratching the surface of its understanding of SARS-CoV-2. Key unknowns include the number of ACE2 receptors needed to bind to each spike protein; when exactly the S2 site is cleaved by TMPRSS2; and the number of spikes needed for virus–cell membrane fusion, says McLellan — and that’s just for entry. In April 2020, a team at the University of California, San Francisco, identified at least 332 interactions between SARS-CoV-2 and human proteins²⁵.

It is not easy to keep pace with the quickly mutating virus. Most mutations so far are associated with how effectively the virus spreads, not with how much the virus damages the host, experts agree. This month, a study reported that the Delta variant grew more rapidly and at higher levels inside people’s lungs and throats than did earlier versions of the virus²⁶.

But it is not yet certain how Delta’s mutations have supercharged the variant in this way, says Stern-Ginossar. “This is something many labs are trying to figure out.”

Nature 595, 640-644 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02039-y

29-07-2021 om 00:30 geschreven door peter  

At least 28 novel viruses are discovered in 15,000-year-old ice from a Tibetan glacier that are 'unlike any that have been catalogued to date'

• Experts from the Ohio State University analysed two ice cores collected in 2015

• They were sampled from the  Guliya ice cap on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau 

• A novel method was used to analysed the microbes and viruses in the cores 

• The team concluded that the viruses would have live in plants and soils

• Furthermore, the viruses showed signs of being adapted to cold conditions

By IAN RANDALL FOR MAILONLINE

Researchers in Tibet have uncovered 33 viruses — 28 of which were previously unknown to science — frozen up in glacier ice that formed up to 15,000 years ago.

The team from the Ohio State University analysed two cores of ice from the Guliya ice cap on the far western Kunlun Shan on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau.

Employing a novel method of analysing microbes and viruses in ice samples without contaminating them, the researchers concluded the viruses lived in soil or plants.

The findings, the team said, may help scientists to better understand how viruses have evolved over the centuries.

Researchers in Tibet have uncovered 33 viruses — 28 of which were previously unknown to science — frozen up in glacier ice that formed 15,000 years ago. Pictured: the Guliya ice cap on the far western Kunlun Shan on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, in China, as seen in 1992

The study was undertaken by microbiologist and palaeoclimatologist Zhi-Ping Zhong of the Ohio State University and colleagues.

'These glaciers were formed gradually — and along with dust and gases, many, many viruses were also deposited in that ice,' said Professor Zhong.

'The glaciers in western China are not well-studied, and our goal is to use this information to reflect past environments.

'And viruses are a part of those environments.' 

In their study, the researchers analysed two core samples collected in 2015 from the Guliya ice cap — the summit of which, where the ice would have originally formed, lies some 22,000 feet (6.7 kilometres) above sea level.

As the ice accumulated in layers year-after-year, trapping material from the surroundings as it grew, the glacier has formed a record that allows scientists to learn more about atmospheric composition, climate and microbiota of the past.

With respect to the latter, the team's analysis revealed the genetic codes for 33 viruses from ice dating back as far as some 15,000 years — four of which were known to science, but at least 28 of which are novel. 

The four familiar viruses belong to families that normally infect bacteria, and were found in far lower concentrations that they have been in oceans or soils.

Yet, according to the team, around half of the viruses appear to have survived at the time in which they were frozen not despite the ice, but rather because of it.

Employing a novel method of analysing microbes and viruses in ice samples (like the pictured core) without contaminating them, the team concluded the viruses lived in soil or plants

 In their study, the researchers analysed two core samples collected in 2015 from the Guliya ice cap — the summit of which, where the ice would have originally formed, lies some 22,000 feet above sea level. Pictured: the topography of the ice cap, showing the core locations

As the ice accumulated in layers year-after-year, the glacier has formed a record that allows scientists to learn more about atmospheric composition, climate and microbiota of the past. With respect to the latter, the team's analysis revealed the genetic codes for 33 viruses from ice dating back as far as some 15,000 years — four of which were known to science, but at least 28 of which are novel. Depicted: cross sections of the two of the core sample, showing the locations and ages of some of the bacteria and viruses identified

'These are viruses that would have thrived in extreme environments,' explained paper author and microbiologist Matthew Sullivan, also of Ohio State University. 

'These viruses have signatures of genes that help them infect cells in cold environments — just surreal genetic signatures for how a virus is able to survive in extreme conditions.'

Based on the environment and comparison to known viruses, the team believe that the newly-discovered viruses likely came from the soil or plants — rather than infecting animals or humans.

'These are not easy signatures to pull out, and the method that Zhi-Ping developed to decontaminate the cores and to study microbes and viruses in ice could help us search for these genetic sequences in other extreme icy environments.'

'These settings could included locations like Mars, for example, the moon, or closer to home in Earth’s Atacama Desert.'

According to the researchers, the study of viruses found preserved in glaciers is a relatively new field — their paper is only the third of its kind — but it is an area of investigation that will become more important as the Earth warms and glaciers melt.

'We know very little about viruses and microbes in these extreme environments, and what is actually there,' said paper author and earth scientist Lonnie Thompson, also of the Ohio State University.

'The documentation and understanding of that is extremely important: How do bacteria and viruses respond to climate change? What happens when we go from an ice age to a warm period like we’re in now?' 

The full findings of the study were published in the journal Microbiome. 

The team from the Ohio State University took two cores of ice from the Guliya ice cap on the far western Kunlun Shan on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, in China

Read more:

• Glacier ice archives nearly 15,000-year-old microbes and phages | Microbiome | Full Text
• ail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5358229/Could-ancient-virus-responsible-consciousness.html

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

25-07-2021 om 21:54 geschreven door peter  

A melting glacier in Tibet has revealed over two dozen previously unknown viruses. The researchers found the viruses in 15,000-year-old ice from the Guliya ice cap of the Tibetan Plateau. They found a total of 33 viruses with 28 of them being completely new to science.

Zhi-Ping Zhong, who is a microbiologist from Ohio State University, went into further details, “These glaciers were formed gradually, and along with dust and gases, many, many viruses were also deposited in that ice.” The same microbes could have possibly been in the atmosphere during that time. “Melting will not only lead to the loss of those ancient, archived microbes and viruses, but also release them to the environments in the future.”

The viruses incredibly would have been thriving in that type of environment with “signatures of genes that help them infect cells in cold environments – just surreal genetic signatures for how a virus is able to survive in extreme conditions,” as explained by Matthew Sullivan who is a microbiologist at Ohio State University.

The researchers then found that the most common viruses found in the ice were bacteriophages that infect Methylobacterium. They were closely related to viruses in Methylobacterium strains that have been found in soil and plants. In other words, the team thinks that the viruses originated in soil and plants.

There are still many questions that need to be answered, such as “How do bacteria and viruses respond to climate change? What happens when we go from an ice age to a warm period like we’re in now?” asked Earth scientist Lonnie Thompson, adding, “We know very little about viruses and microbes in these extreme environments, and what is actually there.”

The study was published in Microbiome.

In other ancient virus news, analysis of 31,600-year-old baby teeth has indicated that the common cold has been around much longer than modern humans. The three baby teeth were found at an archaeological site called Yana “Rhinoceros Horn Site” (RHS) in Siberia and belonged to two different children who lost them between the ages of 10 and 12.

The DNA analysis of the teeth suggests that human adenovirus C (or HAdV-C), which is a virus that causes a mild cold, could have possibly originated hundreds of thousands of years ago (viruses can enter teeth from the bloodstream). Specifically, they believe that the HAdV-C split from other adenoviruses at least 700,000 years ago. The team noticed that the genomes found in the ancient teeth were similar to adenoviruses that were around between the 1950s and 2010s. That is one long-lasting virus.

The study was published in bioRxiv.

{  https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

25-07-2021 om 21:36 geschreven door peter  

A melting glacier in Tibet has revealed over two dozen previously unknown viruses. The researchers found the viruses in 15,000-year-old ice from the Guliya ice cap of the Tibetan Plateau. They found a total of 33 viruses with 28 of them being completely new to science.

Zhi-Ping Zhong, who is a microbiologist from Ohio State University, went into further details, “These glaciers were formed gradually, and along with dust and gases, many, many viruses were also deposited in that ice.” The same microbes could have possibly been in the atmosphere during that time. “Melting will not only lead to the loss of those ancient, archived microbes and viruses, but also release them to the environments in the future.”

The viruses incredibly would have been thriving in that type of environment with “signatures of genes that help them infect cells in cold environments – just surreal genetic signatures for how a virus is able to survive in extreme conditions,” as explained by Matthew Sullivan who is a microbiologist at Ohio State University.

The researchers then found that the most common viruses found in the ice were bacteriophages that infect Methylobacterium. They were closely related to viruses in Methylobacterium strains that have been found in soil and plants. In other words, the team thinks that the viruses originated in soil and plants.

There are still many questions that need to be answered, such as “How do bacteria and viruses respond to climate change? What happens when we go from an ice age to a warm period like we’re in now?” asked Earth scientist Lonnie Thompson, adding, “We know very little about viruses and microbes in these extreme environments, and what is actually there.”

The study was published in Microbiome.

In other ancient virus news, analysis of 31,600-year-old baby teeth has indicated that the common cold has been around much longer than modern humans. The three baby teeth were found at an archaeological site called Yana “Rhinoceros Horn Site” (RHS) in Siberia and belonged to two different children who lost them between the ages of 10 and 12.

The DNA analysis of the teeth suggests that human adenovirus C (or HAdV-C), which is a virus that causes a mild cold, could have possibly originated hundreds of thousands of years ago (viruses can enter teeth from the bloodstream). Specifically, they believe that the HAdV-C split from other adenoviruses at least 700,000 years ago. The team noticed that the genomes found in the ancient teeth were similar to adenoviruses that were around between the 1950s and 2010s. That is one long-lasting virus.

The study was published in bioRxiv.

{  https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

25-07-2021 om 21:36 geschreven door peter  

“An Uncanny Energy” – A Personal Account of UFOs, M.I.B. and More

Nick Redfern

Susan Sheppard was someone I first got to know in 2014 at that year’s annual Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. I next caught up with Susan at the 2016 gig and had a great time. That was the last time I saw Susan. Tragically, Susan passed away in April of this year. In part, her obituary read as follows: “Susan Sheppard, noted poet, author, artist and creator of the Haunted Parkersburg Ghost Tours, died at her home on Monday, April 19, 2021, after a brief but courageous battle with cancer…In the 1990s, Susan started researching and presenting talks about hauntings and the history of downtown Parkersburg and the surrounding areas. Eventually, these talks evolved into the ‘Haunted Parkersburg Walking Tours,’ which she and her helpers presented on weekends during the Halloween season for the past 25 years. Susan’s Tours became some of the most popular in the US, according to several websites that rank them. She also appeared on many nationally-broadcast TV shows about the hauntings in the Mid-Ohio Valley on the Travel Channel, Syfy Channel and others.” Susan gave me one of her reports that made for fascinating reading. And, she very generously let me share it with anyone else who might have liked to read it, too. So, that’s exactly what I’ve done. It’s surely one of those cases that put Susan on the path to try and solve the mysteries in the areas right around her.

Susan Sheppard (Nick Redfern, 2016)

In Susan’s own words: “In late winter of 1967 a church bus was driving over Route 50 that then went directly through the small town of West Union, where I was raised. The occupants of the bus noticed on nearby Shannon’s Knob that a UFO was hovering over my family’s home. Shannon’s Knob was the hillside I grew up on and the highest point in the town. A woman who was a passenger on the bus called my parents to tell them about the spacecraft suspended over our home but my parents were disbelieving.  The following spring my friend Regina Ball and I were playing on the hillside above my family’s house. At the peak of Shannon’s Knob was the entire power source for the town of West Union. We walked up a hill near a clearing to play “Indians” like we always did. As Jeanie and I played, we suddenly heard men’s voices. Turning, we saw two men dressed in black near the rise above us. We were frolicking near the bushes but when we noticed the Men in Black we became scared and hid. We watched silently as the two men measured a spot on the hillside.”

Mothman statue (Nick Redfern, 2016)

There was more to come from Susan: “A few days after some boys were playing on the same hillside. The boys noticed a circular impression in the grass that was about 15-20 feet wide in a treeless area on Shannon’s Knob. They went home and reported it to their parents. My brother came home from school relaying the story from his friends.  In my child’s mind, I made the connection. It was almost like a secret that only I was privy to. To my knowledge, no one ever followed up on the circular impression on Shannon’s Knob nor the UFO sighting over our house. In the winter and spring of 1967, when my grandfather was hit and killed by a train and we witnessed the Men in Black up on Shannon’s Knob, we had other bizarre happenings. Our home became an epicenter for poltergeist activity. Ceramic birds flew off our living room mantle. Pictures fell off the walls. A heavy iron was tossed from my bedroom into the bedroom of my parents and slid under the bed where my Dad was sleeping.”

Continuing from Susan: “But nothing was quite as strange as the footsteps I heard walking on the roof at night. This was the winter of 1967 and for the most part, appearances of these footsteps went on for as long as up until 1970. On certain nights, around 2:00 a.m. a loud bang would punctuate the stillness of my bedroom. It originated from the roof above me. It sounded like someone had jumped out of a helicopter onto our roof with a boom. There would be a pause of a few moments, and then, whoever it was, began to walk on the roof. The roof would creak under the weight. If I would scream for my parents, which I did often, the footsteps would pause until it grew quiet again and they would start right back up. At first my parents did not believe me. However, one morning I heard them talking amongst themselves. My parents had heard the footsteps on the roof as well.

Nick Redfern (2016)

And, finally from Susan: “I began to sleepwalk. Sometimes I would wake up to hear the radio playing what sounded like a Catholic Mass but there were no active Catholic churches in my town. I reached over to turn off the radio and found that the radio wasn’t on. Then I would lie there and listen to a ‘broadcast’ of an ‘angel choir’ with no source for the music until the cords faded as the sun finally came up. One morning I woke up in a different bedroom that my family never used with a sheet pulled over my head like I was a dead person on a gurney ready to be taken to the morgue. As I stirred from sleep, I felt my skin had grown cold against the clammy air and realized every stitch of my clothing had been removed. I had no idea how I got there nor why my clothes had been taken off me. Embarrassed, I jumped from the bare bed, put my clothes on and never told a soul. My parents were sleeping normally in theirs. I was seven years old. Perhaps the strangest tale of all was one about our house more than a decade before we moved in. A young woman was babysitting at what would later be our home. She thought she heard something attempting to climb up the side wall of the house. Too frightened to go check for herself, the girl called the West Union city police. When cops came to check the house, they were shocked when their flashlights shone up the side of the wall. There were muddy footprints traveling up the side of the house. Whether they were human or something else, that part I don’t know. From then on our house became known as one that was ‘haunted’ in town. But by what?” What, indeed.

A great woman. And a great researcher.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

18-07-2021 om 23:35 geschreven door peter  

Giant Swarms Of Grasshoppers That Can Be Seen On Radar Are Devouring Crops All Over The Western U.S.

Michael Snyder is the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, The American Dream Blog and The Truth. You can follow him on Twitter right here

I have written about this before, but this story just got a whole lot stranger.  In previous years, most Americans haven’t been too concerned when giant swarms of insects have devoured crops on the other side of the globe, but now this is actually happening right here in the good old United States of America on a massive scale.  The hot, dry conditions in the western half of the nation have created ideal conditions for grasshoppers to flourish, and millions upon millions of them are now wreaking havoc wherever they go.  In fact, the National Weather Service says that some of the grasshopper swarms are so large that they are showing up on radar…

The National Weather Service (NWS) Glasgow says the radar is lighting up, but not with rain.

Instead, the radar is picking up “countless” grasshoppers in the area according to a post from the NWS.

The grasshoppers are flying as high as 10,000 feet above the ground and are being picked up by the radar the NWS said.

I have never heard of such a thing happening in this nation in my entire lifetime.

According to one news source, some of the grasshopper swarms are so dense “it can appear the earth is moving”…

They’re arriving in swarms so dense it can appear the earth is moving. They’re covering roads and fields, pelting ATV riders, and steadily devouring grains and grass to the bedevilment of farmers and ranchers.

A massive population of grasshoppers is proliferating in the sweltering American west, where a deep drought has made for ideal conditions for grasshopper eggs to hatch and survive into adulthood.

Agricultural production in the western half of the country was already going to be below expectations because of the endless megadrought, and now these grasshoppers are “steadily devouring” fields that farmers have meticulously cultivated.

Not only that, grasshoppers are also eating much of what our cattle herds were supposed to be eating as well…

Grasshoppers, which thrive in hot, dry weather, have been defoliating trees and competing with cattle for food — and the bugs are winning. Ranchers are selling cattle “due to poor forage conditions and a lack of feed,” according to the latest US drought monitor.

This is not a small problem that we are talking about.

On average, in seven western states “each square yard of land contains at least 15 grasshoppers” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture…

Around 93% of the West is in some level of drought this week, and a bizarre impact of this pernicious dry condition is the explosion of the grasshopper population. Grasshoppers have devoured so much vegetation that many ranchers fear rangelands could be stripped bare.

A 2021 grasshopper hazard map from the US Department of Agriculture shows each square yard of land contains at least 15 grasshoppers in parts of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, Colorado, and Nebraska.

That is nuts.  I knew that this crisis was bad, but I didn’t know that it was this bad.

From the moment that they are born until the moment they die, these grasshoppers are constantly eating.

In the past, I have used the term “voracious” to describe them, and that is precisely what they are.  They are never satisfied, and they are always looking for new fields to ravage.

One rancher in southern Oregon is absolutely horrified that they have shown up in his area in such massive numbers this year…

“I can only describe grasshoppers in expletives,” said Richard Nicholson, a cattle rancher in Fort Klamath, a small community in southern Oregon, who once recalled seeing grasshopper bands eat 1,000 acres a day and cover the ground like snow. The insects cause innumerable headaches for farmers and ranchers, competing with cattle for tough-to-find wild forage and costing tens of thousands of dollars in lost crops and associated costs. “They are a scourge of the Earth … They just destroy the land, destroy the crops. They are just a bad, bad predator.”

Needless to say, this is yet another factor which will have a huge impact on agricultural production this year.

Food prices have already been rising quite aggressively in recent months, and this certainly isn’t going to help matters.

Just when you think that things can’t possibly get any worse in the western half of the country, somehow they do, and many believe that what we have experienced so far is just the beginning.

Scientists are telling us that there is no end in sight for the endless megadrought that is affecting so many western states right now, and that means that the grasshoppers will be with us for the foreseeable future as well.

The summer of 2021 is only a couple of weeks old, but already there have been so many problems.  Hopefully things will start to return to “normal” soon, but personally I have a feeling that a whole lot more chaos is just around the corner.

***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

• About the Author: My name is Michael Snyder and my brand new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available on Amazon.com.  In addition to my new book, I have written four others that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned)  By purchasing the books you help to support the work that my wife and I are doing, and by giving it to others you help to multiply the impact that we are having on people all over the globe.  I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe.  I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article.  The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.  I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook, Twitter and Parler, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help.  During these very challenging times, people will need hope more than ever before, and it is our goal to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as we possibly can.

The post Giant Swarms Of Grasshoppers That Can Be Seen On Radar Are Devouring Crops All Over The Western U.S. first appeared on End Of The American Dream. Michael Snyder is the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, The American Dream Blog and The Truth. You can follow him on Twitter right here

Source: 

• http://endoftheamericandream.com/giant-swarms-of-grasshoppers-that-can-be-seen-on-radar-are-devouring-crops-all-over-the-western-u-s/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

16-07-2021 om 23:27 geschreven door peter  

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

12-07-2021 om 20:56 geschreven door peter  

12 Biggest Sinkholes Caught Swallowing Things On An EPIC Scale

If you haven’t seen any sinkholes, let us tell you that they are pretty terrifying to watch, let alone be close to. Just imagine the fear anyone would feel while being swallowed by the earth under their feet. It’s pretty much the same as being buried alive. Although not all sinkholes turn out to be utterly devastating, some are the epitome of danger. In today’s video, we’ll be telling you all about the craziest sinkholes that were caught on camera, from a sinkhole that boiled people alive to the one that swallowed an entire beach.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

12-07-2021 om 18:08 geschreven door peter  

12 Terrifying Animals You Wouldn't Want To Encounter

Unless you’re a wildlife enthusiast or expert, there’s a good chance you are not aware of the uniquely terrifying animals that still inhabit the wilderness and oceans. If you assumed that the reign of these nightmarish scary beasts ended hundreds of thousands of years ago or at least their presence has been reduced because of the rapid urbanization, get ready to be amazed. Because turns out, these formidable beasts still co-habit the planet with us and can keep you up at nights from fear with just their looks.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected qnd posted by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

10-07-2021 om 21:17 geschreven door peter  

New Navy Maps and Post – Pole Shift Maps

There’s a new spike in interest in POLE SHIFTS after a lot of Youtube videos in the last few weeks started commenting on a “new navy map” that isn’t really new and isn’t really from the U.S. Navy. There are a lot of maps based on estimates of what would happen if polar ice all melted or what would happen if the Earth’s crust slips over the core and a pole shift creates a new arrangement of the planet’s surface, with all the continents at different latitudes and elevations, and new locations for the poles, the equator, and everything in between.

It’s all guesswork, but it’s pretty cool to look at. Consider these pics from a video just based on all the ice melting:

Thank you Youtube’s RealLifeLore channel for the “How Will Earth Change If All the Ice Melts?” video

More recently Pastor Paul Begley made several videos highlighting a map he got from “Mike From Around the World” and this map of the eastern United States also shows many areas submerged and is allegedly based on the U.S. Navy’s expectations of a worst case climate change scenario in the near future:

• US Nuclear Target Map. Do You Live in The Danger Zone?

In this map many low lying areas, including Florida, Cuba, and much of the southeastern United States and eastern coastal areas are just gone, submerged underwater. But this map is based more on soil liquefaction.

Next, imagine the far greater catastrophe of a POLE SHIFT – in which the entire crust of the planet moves as one solid piece over the core, shifting mass imbalances like the accumulated ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica to the equator after cosmic electromagnetic field changes induce a solar outburst and the Earth is affected on many levels…. Well explained and documented by Ben Davidson in many videos on his SuspiciousObservers channel on Youtube.

Ben Davidson’s map above only shows the new positions of the continents if the massive ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland are re-balanced and allowed to shift to the equator. No changes in elevation – no submergence of existing lands – or rising of old ones – is depicted above. But it may very well show the future equator. Chan Thomas, author of The Adam and Eve story and the subject of my next book, predicted that the upcoming pole shift will see the new North Pole in the Bay of Bengal, and that is where our magnetic poles seem to be moving to a convergence point – the magnetic poles are currently on a collision course towards the Bay of Bengal. (And Chan Thomas is not the only pole shift researcher who expected that position for the next North Pole.) If this happens, southeast Asia will be under one of the next ice caps, along with Peru, as the new South Pole would end up just west of Peru. But before those new ice caps grow, the old ones we have known will be melting rapidly in the equatorial sunshine. I often wonder what newly habitable lands will emerge, and what evidence may yet be found of previous civilizations….

Different analysts have different expectations based on the evidence of past pole shifts and current terrestrial, solar, and galactic ongoing changes. If you want a deeper look at the evidence, consider reading some good pole shift books like POLE SHIFT: Evidence Will Not Be Silenced – and several others found here.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

10-07-2021 om 20:59 geschreven door peter  

A new quantum paradox throws the foundations of observed reality into question

by Eric Cavalcanti, The Conversation

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Perhaps not, some say.

And if someone is there to hear it? If you think that means it obviously did make a sound, you might need to revise that opinion.

We have found a new paradox in quantum mechanics—one of our two most fundamental scientific theories, together with Einstein's theory of relativity—that throws doubt on some common-sense ideas about physical reality.

Quantum mechanics vs common sense

Take a look at these three statements:

1. When someone observes an event happening, it really happened.
2. It is possible to make free choices, or at least, statistically random choices.
3. A choice made in one place can't instantly affect a distant event. (Physicists call this "locality.")

These are all intuitive ideas, and widely believed even by physicists. But our research, published in Nature Physics, shows they cannot all be true—or quantum mechanics itself must break down at some level.

This is the strongest result yet in a long series of discoveries in quantum mechanics that have upended our ideas about reality. To understand why it's so important, let's look at this history.

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

The battle for reality

Quantum mechanics works extremely well to describe the behavior of tiny objects, such as atoms or particles of light (photons). But that behavior is … very odd.

In many cases, quantum theory doesn't give definite answers to questions such as "where is this particle right now?" Instead, it only provides probabilities for where the particle might be found when it is observed.

For Niels Bohr, one of the founders of the theory a century ago, that's not because we lack information, but because physical properties like "position" don't actually exist until they are measured.

And what's more, because some properties of a particle can't be perfectly observed simultaneously—such as position and velocity—they can't be real simultaneously.

No less a figure than Albert Einstein found this idea untenable. In a 1935 article with fellow theorists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, he argued there must be more to reality than what quantum mechanics could describe.

The article considered a pair of distant particles in a special state now known as an "entangled" state. When the same property (say, position or velocity) is measured on both entangled particles, the result will be random—but there will be a correlation between the results from each particle.

For example, an observer measuring the position of the first particle could perfectly predict the result of measuring the position of the distant one, without even touching it. Or the observer could choose to predict the velocity instead. This had a natural explanation, they argued, if both properties existed before being measured, contrary to Bohr's interpretation.

However, in 1964 Northern Irish physicist John Bell found Einstein's argument broke down if you carried out a more complicated combination of different measurements on the two particles.

Bell showed that if the two observers randomly and independently choose between measuring one or another property of their particles, like position or velocity, the average results cannot be explained in any theory where both position and velocity were pre-existing local properties.

That sounds incredible, but experiments have now conclusively demonstrated Bell's correlations do occur. For many physicists, this is evidence that Bohr was right: physical properties don't exist until they are measured.

But that raises the crucial question: what is so special about a "measurement"?

The observer, observed

In 1961, the Hungarian-American theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner devised a thought experiment to show what's so tricky about the idea of measurement.

He considered a situation in which his friend goes into a tightly sealed lab and performs a measurement on a quantum particle—its position, say.

However, Wigner noticed that if he applied the equations of quantum mechanics to describe this situation from the outside, the result was quite different. Instead of the friend's measurement making the particle's position real, from Wigner's perspective the friend becomes entangled with the particle and infected with the uncertainty that surrounds it.

This is similar to Schrödinger's famous cat, a thought experiment in which the fate of a cat in a box becomes entangled with a random quantum event.

For Wigner, this was an absurd conclusion. Instead, he believed that once the consciousness of an observer becomes involved, the entanglement would "collapse" to make the friend's observation definite.

But what if Wigner was wrong?

Our experiment

In our research, we built on an extended version of the Wigner's friend paradox, first proposed by Časlav Brukner of the University of Vienna. In this scenario, there are two physicists—call them Alice and Bob—each with their own friends (Charlie and Debbie) in two distant labs.

There's another twist: Charlie and Debbie are now measuring a pair of entangled particles, like in the Bell experiments.

As in Wigner's argument, the equations of quantum mechanics tell us Charlie and Debbie should become entangled with their observed particles. But because those particles were already entangled with each other, Charlie and Debbie themselves should become entangled—in theory.

But what does that imply experimentally?

Our experiment goes like this: the friends enter their labs and measure their particles. Some time later, Alice and Bob each flip a coin. If it's heads, they open the door and ask their friend what they saw. If it's tails, they perform a different measurement.

This different measurement always gives a positive outcome for Alice if Charlie is entangled with his observed particle in the way calculated by Wigner. Likewise for Bob and Debbie.

In any realization of this measurement, however, any record of their friend's observation inside the lab is blocked from reaching the external world. Charlie or Debbie will not remember having seen anything inside the lab, as if waking up from total anesthesia.

But did it really happen, even if they don't remember it?

If the three intuitive ideas at the beginning of this article are correct, each friend saw a real and unique outcome for their measurement inside the lab, independent of whether or not Alice or Bob later decided to open their door. Also, what Alice and Charlie see should not depend on how Bob's distant coin lands, and vice versa.

We showed that if this were the case, there would be limits to the correlations Alice and Bob could expect to see between their results. We also showed that quantum mechanics predicts Alice and Bob will see correlations that go beyond those limits.

Next, we did an experiment to confirm the quantum mechanical predictions using pairs of entangled photons. The role of each friend's measurement was played by one of two paths each photon may take in the setup, depending on a property of the photon called "polarization." That is, the path "measures" the polarization.

Our experiment is only really a proof of principle, since the "friends" are very small and simple. But it opens the question whether the same results would hold with more complex observers.

We may never be able to do this experiment with real humans. But we argue that it may one day be possible to create a conclusive demonstration if the "friend" is a human-level artificial intelligence running in a massive quantum computer.

What does it all mean?

Although a conclusive test may be decades away, if the quantum mechanical predictions continue to hold, this has strong implications for our understanding of reality—even more so than the Bell correlations. For one, the correlations we discovered cannot be explained just by saying that physical properties don't exist until they are measured.

Now the absolute reality of measurement outcomes themselves is called into question.

Our results force physicists to deal with the measurement problem head on: either our experiment doesn't scale up, and quantum mechanics gives way to a so-called "objective collapse theory," or one of our three common-sense assumptions must be rejected.

There are theories, like de Broglie-Bohm, that postulate "action at a distance," in which actions can have instantaneous effects elsewhere in the universe. However, this is in direct conflict with Einstein's theory of relativity.

Some search for a theory that rejects freedom of choice, but they either require backwards causality, or a seemingly conspiratorial form of fatalism called "superdeterminism".

Another way to resolve the conflict could be to make Einstein's theory even more relative. For Einstein, different observers could disagree about when or where something happens—but what happens was an absolute fact.

However, in some interpretations, such as relational quantum mechanics, QBism, or the many-worlds interpretation, events themselves may occur only relative to one or more observers. A fallen tree observed by one may not be a fact for everyone else.

All of this does not imply that you can choose your own reality. Firstly, you can choose what questions you ask, but the answers are given by the world. And even in a relational world, when two observers communicate, their realities are entangled. In this way a shared reality can emerge.

Which means that if we both witness the same tree falling and you say you can't hear it, you might just need a hearing aid.

• Quantum physics: Our study suggests objective reality doesn't exist

{ https://phys.org/ }

03-07-2021 om 17:40 geschreven door peter  

© Provided by Daily Mail MailOnline logo

A coronavirus outbreak struck East Asia some 20,000 years ago — and left traces of the epidemic in the genetic makeup of people from that area, a study has found.

An international team of researchers led from the University of Queensland analysed the genes in human DNA that code for proteins that interact with coronaviruses.

They found evidence among the DNA people of East Asian ancestry of natural selection for adaptations that would have served to lessen disease severity.

COVID-19 — which has killed some 3.8 million people over the course of the last 18 months — is not the only severe outbreak of coronavirus that jumped from animals.

In 2002, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome resulting from SARS-CoV emerged in China and led to more than 800 mortalities. 

Meanwhile, MERS-CoV — which leads to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome — killed more than 850 people after it was first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012. 

Scroll down for video

© Provided by Daily Mail 

'The modern human genome contains evolutionary information tracing back tens of thousands of years,' said paper author and synthetic biologist Kirill Alexandrov of the Queensland University of Technology.

{ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

01-07-2021 om 16:31 geschreven door peter  

The entire world right now is going through a horrible and deadly pandemic with over 180,000,000 people having been infected with COVID-19 and almost 4,000,000 deaths. But this isn’t a new thing as over 20,000 years ago there was another coronavirus infection that hit the eastern part of Asia.

A new study was conducted by researchers from the United States and Australia who analyzed the genomes of over 2,500 people belonging to 26 different worldwide populations. They specifically found the earliest interaction of the human genome with coronavirus infections and those genetic imprints are incredibly still present in the DNA of people currently from East Asia.

Lead author Yassine Souilmi explained that viruses duplicate themselves; however, they don’t have the tools to do that on their own, “So they actually depend on a host, and that’s why they invade a host and then they hijack their machinery to create copies of themselves.” The hijacking on the cells can still be seen in today’s populations which allowed the researchers to pinpoint whose ancestors may have been exposed to a very ancient form of coronavirus.

The experts found specific genomes with signs of ancient coronavirus in five populations located in China, Japan, and Vietnam. It is possible that the virus could have spread to other parts of the world but there is no information so far on whether or not that happened.

In those five specific populations, the researchers discovered that a beneficial mutation had been developed throughout the years that aided in protecting them against coronavirus and gave them a better chance of surviving it. Souilmi explained this further, “Over a long period of time, and along the exposure, this leaves a very, very clear marking in the genomes of their descendants,” adding, “And that’s the signature we actually use to detect this ancient epidemic, and also the timing of this ancient epidemic.”

It is unknown how many people caught the virus, how many died as a result from it, and what type of symptoms they had – was it like a normal flu or something much worse, similar to what we’re currently dealing with? Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that coronavirus hit a part of the world over 20,000 years ago and it is now doing the same thing but much, much worse.

The study was published in Current Biology where it can be read in full.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

01-07-2021 om 16:17 geschreven door peter  

Earth Is Trapping 'Unprecedented' Amount of Heat, Says NASA

Jose A. Bernat Bacete / Getty Images

Left to its own devices, Earth’s climate typically takes thousands of years to change. Thanks to human activities, however, what previously took millennia now is taking only decades, suggests a new joint study by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).1 Published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, it finds the Earth is retaining twice as much heat now as it did in the early 2000s.1

Specifically, scientists used two different means to measure and assess the Earth’s energy imbalance, which is the amount of radiative energy that the planet absorbs from the sun relative to the amount of thermal infrared radiation that it emits into space. The first was NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES), a suite of satellite sensors that measure the amount of energy entering and leaving the Earth’s atmosphere. The second was Argo, a global network of ocean floats that measure the retention of energy in the ocean. Both revealed a positive energy imbalance, which means Earth is retaining more energy than it’s releasing.1

That causes the planet to heat up. By a lot, it turns out: Data from both CERES and Argo show that Earth’s energy imbalance in 2019 was double what it was in 2005, just 14 years prior.1

“The two very independent ways of looking at changes in Earth’s energy imbalance are in really, really good agreement, and they’re both showing this very large trend, which gives us a lot of confidence that what we’re seeing is a real phenomenon and not just an instrumental artifact,” said NASA scientist Norman Loeb, lead author of the study and principal investigator for CERES at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. “The trends we found were quite alarming in a sense.

Scientists blame rapid heating on a mix of human and natural causes. On the one hand, they observe, increases in greenhouse gas emissions from human activities—for example, driving, deforestation, and manufacturing—have trapped outgoing heat in the atmosphere that Earth would otherwise emit into space. That causes changes in snow and ice melt, water vapor, and cloud cover, which in turn creates even more warming.

On the other hand, scientists also note a concurrent change in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), a natural pattern of climate variability in the eastern Pacific Ocean. During the time period in question, the PDO—which is like a longer-term El Niño—switched from a cool phase to a warm phase, which likely exacerbated Earth’s positive energy imbalance.

“It’s likely a mix of anthropogenic forcing and internal variability,” Loeb said. “And over this period they’re both causing warming, which leads to a fairly large change in Earth’s energy imbalance. The magnitude of the increase is unprecedented.”

The increase is as impactful as it is unprecedented.

“It’s excess energy that’s being taken up by the planet, so it’s going to mean further increases in temperatures and more melting of snow and sea ice, which will cause sea level rise—all things that society really cares about,” Loeb told CNN, adding that accelerated warming will likely produce “shifts in atmospheric circulations, including more extreme events like droughts.Because 90% of the excess energy from an energy imbalance is absorbed by the ocean, yet another consequence will be ocean acidification from higher water temperatures, which will impact fish and marine biodiversity, CNN points out.

“My hope is the rate that we’re seeing this energy imbalance subsides in the coming decades,” Loeb continued in his CNN interview. “Otherwise, we’re going to see more alarming climate changes.”

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to predict what those changes might be or when they’ll occur, stress Loeb and his colleagues, who describe their research as “a snapshot relative to long-term climate change.” Still, the science is getting better all the time. By using it to measure the severity of global warming, scientists at NASA and NOAA hope to inform and influence actions that will stop or reverse human-induced climate change before it’s too late to do so.

“The lengthening and highly complementary records from [space- and ocean-based sensors] have allowed us both to pin down Earth’s energy imbalance with increasing accuracy, and to study its variations and trends with increasing insight, as time goes on,” said Gregory Johnson, Loeb’s co-author on the study and physical oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. “Observing the magnitude and variations of this energy imbalance are vital to understanding Earth’s changing climate.”

 RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.treehugger.com/ }

30-06-2021 om 01:17 geschreven door peter  

Scary US SECRET WEAPON June 14 Can destroy Russia and China with one SHOT

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

14-06-2021 om 22:15 geschreven door peter  

Scientists in a Russian lab have brought back to life miniature “zombies” that were frozen about 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) beneath the Siberian permafrost for 24,000 years (in the Alazeya River). These multicellular microscopic creatures, which are called bdelloid rotifers (or wheel animals), have been living in freshwater locations for approximately 50 million years.

Rotifers have miniature hair-like features called a cilia ring that circles its mouth. They have a lorica around their body for protection as well as a foot. Their tiny organs include a brain, eye-spot, jaw, kidneys, stomach, and urinary bladder.

In previous studies, researchers confirmed that rotifers could be frozen at a temperature of minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius) and then brought back to life 10 years after. While that is incredible, the most recent study produced even more jaw-dropping results as the researchers were able to bring back the rotifers that were alive during the Pleistocene Epoch and were frozen for 24,000 years. When these creatures were thawed out, they started reproducing asexually through parthenogenesis and even created genetic duplicate clones.

The rotifers were found in Siberian permafrost.

In an email to Live Science, Stas Malavin, who is a researcher at the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science in Pushchino, Russia, explained their experiment in more detail, “We put a piece of permafrost into a Petri dish filled with [a] suitable medium and wait until organisms that are alive recover from their dormancy, start moving, and multiply.” After they cloned themselves, they were so genetically identical that the researchers could not tell the difference between the new and old ones.

The fact that this creature was resuscitated from a suspended metabolic state (called cryptobiosis) is astonishing but actually quite normal for rotifers as they have evolved to be able to use cryptobiosis because of where they live – the waters could dry up or freeze over. Furthermore, they can restore any DNA that may get harmed and can protect their cells from damaging molecules. The study was published in the journal Current Biology where it can be read in full.

Pictures and a video of the rotifer can be seen here.

Rotifer recovering from week-long cryptobiosis in the lab. 

(Image credit: Lyubov Shmakova)

Interestingly, this wasn’t the first time that an ancient frozen creature had been brought back to life. Back in 2012, scientists were able to successfully regenerate plants from immature fruit tissue that had been frozen in the Siberian permafrost for about 30,000 years. Then in 2014, moss that was frozen in Antarctic ice for 1,500 years had been regrown. And in 2018, two worms that were found in the Siberian permafrost (one dated back about 32,000 years and the other was around 42,000 years old) were revived.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

09-06-2021 om 22:28 geschreven door peter  

Essential Politics: Are we closer to understanding UFOs? What to know about the congressional report

{ https://www.latimes.com/ }

09-06-2021 om 01:49 geschreven door peter