What the Heck?! Thread (Closed)

[plawolf]

A government agency reanimating a 30,000 year old virus, what can go wrong? Will they deliver it by mistake along with some inert anthrax? Instead of figuring out how to reanimate prehistoric viruses that might wipe humanity, should they not be spending it’s time trying to figure out how to kill the viruses that are currently afflicting mankind? Have they become that “bored” with HIV, Ebola, Shingles, influenza all the other nasty little viruses

Many modern cures for deadly bacteria and viruses originated from nature. Penicillin is a classic example.

Studying ancient, long-dead viruses could yield new insight and treatment vectors for modern illnesses, since many modern viruses potentially evolved from these ancient strains.

Even if we assume nothing new could be learnt from studying these old viruses in terms of combating modern illnesses, it is still probably a good idea to study them, since climate change is melting a lot of permafrost, so some of these long dead viruses may eventually revive naturally, if they have not done so already.

In which case it would be extremely wise to know how they work and potentially even have vaccines ready in case they break out in the wild.

In a way, its kind of like a reverse lottery situation.

The chances that one of these revived strains could infect humans or animals is extremely small, but the consequences could be extremely bad if such a strain existed and became loose and active.

Viruses evolved and adapted along with the host organisms they target, and are almost always highly specific to particular species. Cross species infections are extremely rare, and since the animals those ancient viruses evolved to target are all extinct or have evolved into something different, odds are those viruses are simply unable to infect anything living now.

The flip side is that in the event one of these revived strains could infect currently living animals (including but not limited to humans), since no living creature would have any antibodies to them, the effects could be absolutely devastating, as history can attest to.

Actually, one of the things that came to my mind when reading about the massed die-off of antelopes a few pages back was that maybe something ancient had revived from thawing icecaps or permafrost and infected those animals.

Barring man-made environmental disasters, usually in nature, one of the few things that could cause such large scale and near universal die-offs is either something very new or very very old that none of the living animals had any natural immunity against.

 

[Quickie]

This is the original story that assumed that the relative amount of 14C in the atmospheric CO2 is constant. Around 1970 people started to compare the known dates of Egyptian artifacts with their radiocarbon dates and the differences were large. Therefore when possible radiocarbon dates were calibrated against initially wooden beams in old buildings that were chained together using dendrochronology. Later the chain was lengthened by using trees found in bogs and peat. You don't get back to 50 000 years of course but at any rate for the last 10 000 years or so radiocarbon dates are calibrated against real years.

To say that radiocarbon dates can be calibrated against real years is a bit of oversimplification. I would say a carbon dating method that takes into consideration the variability of the historical atmospheric carbon 14 level, will result in a wider margin of error for the deduced dates. As at present, the error for carbon dating could be about +/- 80 years.

 

[Quickie]

I should say, the error for carbon dating could be about +/- 80 years for a relatively recent sample of 3000 years.

 

[delft]

To say that radiocarbon dates can be calibrated against real years is a bit of oversimplification. I would say a carbon dating method that takes into consideration the variability of the historical atmospheric carbon 14 level, will result in a wider margin of error for the deduced dates. As at present, the error for carbon dating could be about +/- 80 years.

Wider at some times, narrower at others depending on the curve of 14C content against time. And of course the lower the 14C content of the carbon in the sample the wider the margin.

 

[kwaigonegin]

A government agency reanimating a 30,000 year old virus, what can go wrong? Will they deliver it by mistake along with some inert anthrax? Instead of figuring out how to reanimate prehistoric viruses that might wipe humanity, should they not be spending it’s time trying to figure out how to kill the viruses that are currently afflicting mankind? Have they become that “bored” with HIV, Ebola, Shingles, influenza all the other nasty little viruses

Frankenvirus emerges from Siberia's frozen wasteland

Paris (AFP) - Scientists said they will reanimate a 30,000-year-old giant virus unearthed in the frozen wastelands of Siberia, and warned climate change may awaken dangerous microscopic pathogens.

Reporting this week in the flagship journal of the US National Academy of Sciences, French researchers announced the discovery of Mollivirus sibericum, the fourth type of pre-historic virus found since 2003 -- and the second by this team.

Before waking it up, researchers will have to verify that the bug cannot cause animal or human disease.

To qualify as a "giant", a virus has to be longer than half a micron, a thousandth of a millimetre (0.00002 of an inch).

Mollivirus sibericum -- "soft virus from Siberia" -- comes in at 0.6 microns, and was found in the permafrost of northeastern Russia.

Climate change is warming the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions at more than twice the global average, which means that permafrost is not so permanent any more.

Cells of the Mollivirus sibericum, a virus that was buried deep in the Siberian permafrost for over …

"A few viral particles that are still infectious may be enough, in the presence of a vulnerable host, to revive potentially pathogenic viruses," one of the lead researchers, Jean-Michel Claverie, told AFP.

The regions in which these giant microbes have been found are coveted for their mineral resources, especially oil, and will become increasingly accessible for industrial exploitation as more of the ice melts away.

"If we are not careful, and we industrialise these areas without putting safeguards in place, we run the risk of one day waking up viruses such as small pox that we thought were eradicated," he added.

In safe laboratory conditions, Claverie and colleagues will attempt to revive the newly discovered virus by placing it with single-cell amoeba, which will serve as its host.

Claverie, who runs a lab at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and a team discovered another giant virus, which they called Pithovirus sibericum, at the same location in 2013, then managed to revive it in a petri dish.


In 2004, US at a top-security lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) resurrecte …

Unlike most viruses circulating today, and to the general astonishment of scientists, these ancient specimens dating from the last Ice Age are not only bigger, but far more complex genetically.

M. sibericum has more than 500 genes, while another family of giant virus discovered in 2003, Pandoravirus, has 2,500. The Influenza A virus, by contrast, has eight genes.

In 2004, US scientists resurrected the notorious "Spanish flu" virus, which killed tens of millions of people, in order to understand how the pathogen was extraordinarily so virulent.

US researchers flew to Alaska to take frozen lung tissues from a woman who was buried in permafrost.

By teasing genetic scraps out of these precious samples and from autopsy tissues stored in formalin, the team painstakingly reconstructed the code for the virus' eight genes.

The work was done in a top-security lab at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).


Back to bottling my Grenache, in a hermetically sealed suit

stupid fools! Haven't they seen what some thousands of yrs old unknown virus from the permafrost can do?

 

[solarz]

stupid fools! Haven't they seen what some thousands of yrs old unknown virus from the permafrost can do?

We get mammoth flu?

 

[broadsword]

Still hung up on carbon dating. Something here to ruminate over.

Many Global Warming Studies May be Wrong as Carbon Dating Found to be Highly Unreliable for Organic Matter over 30,000 Years Old

Sep 09, 2015

The Kongsfjorden fjord in Norway. Scientists have for over half a century.relied on carbon dating to gauge the age of organic matter and help determine when some events happened. Photo: AFP

Radiocarbon dating, which is used to calculate the age of certain organic materials, has been found to be unreliable, and sometimes wildly so - a discovery that could upset previous studies on climate change, scientists from China and Germany said in a new paper.

Their recent analysis of sediment from the largest freshwater lake in northeast China showed that its carbon clock stopped ticking as early as 30,000 years ago, or nearly half as long as was hitherto thought.

As scientists who study earth’s (relatively) modern history rely on this measurement tool to place their findings in the correct time period, the discovery that it is unreliable could put some in a quandary.

For instance, remnants of organic matter formerly held up as solid evidence of the most recent, large-scale global warming event some 40,000 years ago may actually date back far earlier to a previous ice age.

"The radiocarbon dating technique may significantly underestimate the age of sediment for samples older than 30,000 years,” said the authors of the report from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Applied Geophysics.

"Thus it is necessary to pay [special] attention when using such old carbon data for palaeoclimatic or archaeological interpretations," they added.

Their work was detailed in a paper in the latest issue of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

For over 50 years, scientists and researchers have relied on carbon dating to find the exact age of organic matter.

Prior to that, they had to depend on more rudimentary and imprecise methods, such as counting the number of rings on a cross-section of tree trunk.

This all changed in the 1940s when US chemist Willard Libby discovered that carbon-14, a radioactive isotope, could be used to date organic compounds.

His theory was that all living creatures have a constant proportion of radioactive and non-radioactive carbons in their body because they keep absorbing these elements from the environment.

But as soon as the creature dies it stops absorbing these and sheds any trace of carbon-14 at a decay rate of 50 per cent every 5,700 years.

By measuring the remaining amount of carbon-14 in a sample, scientists could estimate the time of death up to 60,000 years ago.

Before that, all traces of radiocarbon would be too small to detect.

But the method had one major flaw: it didn’t account for changes in the proportion of radioactive and non-radioactive carbon in the environment; and if these had changed, the estimate would most likely be wrong.

Many events can affect the levels of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, such as the burning of fossil fuel or the detonation of an atom bomb.

In the new study using samples taken from Xingkai Lake near the Sino-Russian border in Heilongjiang province, the scientists used both radiocarbon dating and another method known as optically stimulated luminescence.

Using light to measure the amount of free electrons trapped in quartz, the team was able to tell how long the samples had been kept away from sunlight, and therefore estimate when it was that they first fell in the lake.

By comparing results from the two methods, they found that carbon dating became unreliable beyond a range of 30,000 years.

The great lakes are widely believed to have appeared in China due to the massive melting of ice sheets during an exceptionally warm period some 40,000 years ago, and sediment from Xingkai Lake served as key evidence.

But the new study suggests that the sediment might be over 80,000 years old, possibly formed during an ice age.

"The carbon-14-based mega-lake hypothesis was even incorporated into modelling work to interpret regional climate dynamics,” the paper reported.

“[It] traces its link to atmospheric circulation systems such as the Asian monsoon.”

The new finding is important because it aligns with rising concern about the reliability of carbon dating, said Professor Liu Jinyi, specimen curator with the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing.

"Many alternative methods to date objects are now available, but carbon dating is still the most popular because we have used it for a long time with such ease and comfort," said Liu, who was not involved in the study.

"But the method should be limited to young samples, and more efforts should be made to improve its accuracy," he added. (South China Morning Post)

 

[delft]

Still hung up on carbon dating. Something here to ruminate over.

Prior to that, they had to depend on more rudimentary and imprecise methods, such as counting the number of rings on a cross-section of tree trunk.

Dendrochronology is the most precise, but you need a chain of trees from recent to old, comparing patterns of thinner and thicker rings cause by regional weather differences in different years, and thus needing a lot of work in a region to construct the chain. Counting takes you to the precise year a certain ring was grown. You then take parts of such rings to determine the 14C part of the carbon in that ring using by counting and weighting the individual carbon atoms.

 

[TerraN_EmpirE]

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, No I did randomly type keys on my keyboard and I am not having pets jump on it either this is the name of a Welsh village. and what made news of the Weird is one highly skilled English weatherman

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The name if you are wondering is translated as "

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in the hollow of the white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio of the red cave,"
Why does he get in the news? 1.7 million views and 18,200 shares on facebook

 

[Equation]

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, No I did randomly type keys on my keyboard and I am not having pets jump on it either this is the name of a Welsh village. and what made news of the Weird is one highly skilled English weatherman

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

The name if you are wondering is translated as "

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

in the hollow of the white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio of the red cave,"
Why does he get in the news? 1.7 million views and 18,200 shares on facebook

I gave up after the first ten letters.