30,000 Year Old Siberia Virus Comes Back To Life

[Strazdas]

VIruses can mutate and change. Also just because homo erectus was immune does not mean we are. Common flu has viped out the atztec population, what if they had a virus our immune system has never seen before? not to mention that more viruses give more chance for mutated strains that wont be nice.

Even if we take this away, a virus that kills single cell organism can still be quite damaging to our ecosystem if it spreads enough. after all our ecosystem is much different from that of 30.000 years ago and will not react in the same way. and we need that ecosystem to survive.

So dont write this off as not dangerous. Then agian, looks like the scientists do have the correct concerns here, so good for them.

I read this yesterday before leaving work.

I then inexplicably went home and bought Plague, Inc [http://store.steampowered.com/app/246620/].

Zombie amoebae mind viruses!

That aside, Plague Inc is actually rather fun. I don't care for all the "unlocking" though.

Its fun till you turn on the hard mode where being invisible costs you a shitload of points without those unlocks. Still if you play it just for fun its a great game altrough its very easy to spot the infection algorythms and adapt your strategy based on metagame.

Always a good use of The Thing but I was thinking it's a bit more like The Thaw

The Thaw is definatelly closer to this virus, but it is also obscure and rather bad movie too.

I forget, isn't this a concern about say we go to Mars and bring back a virus or something by mistake or am I thinking of a really bad sci-fi movie plot?

There was concern about it and NASA did all the quarantine procedures, until it was proven that bacteria/viruses as we know them could not survive the enviroment there so they stopped doing that. Now, there were a few scares with bacterias on mars, but it always turns out our own contamination that we brough from earth. Of course a REAL martian virus could potentially wipe us out (our immune system has no idea how to deal with it, and you cant kill viruses with antibiotics), but to find one thats a challenge.

Why do people just accept the age they state? They provide no proof. "Look, a 30,000 old virus!" "How do you know its that old?" "Because the ice is that old!" "How do you know the ice is that old?" "We just do!"

Or they could have dated the ice? [http://www.academia.edu/2602359/Methods_for_Dating_Ice_Cores]

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

"a recipe for disaster."

has that ever stopped man? look at that ancient ice, taunting us with its secrets, mother nature thinks she can hide shit from us? ***** you think you are still dealing with old Homo habilis? oh no, Homo fuckin' sapiens

This is what happens when you dig too deep; Ancient Bacteria isn't something to be messed with. Isn't that how the plague came about when we mined too far?

wow no, it was transmited by rats or rather their fleas, so unless they were the ones doing the mining...

 

[Gilhelmi]

"At least a stock of vaccine should be kept, just in case," says Claverie and Abergel.

I thought that vaccines could only be made against "known" threats and that a general vaccine against "everything" is near impossible.

 

[Jamieson 90]

"a recipe for disaster."

has that ever stopped man? look at that ancient ice, taunting us with its secrets, mother nature thinks she can hide shit from us? ***** you think you are still dealing with old Homo habilis? oh no, Homo fuckin' sapiens

This is what happens when you dig too deep; Ancient Bacteria isn't something to be messed with. Isn't that how the plague came about when we mined too far?

wow no, it was transmited by rats or rather their fleas, so unless they were the ones doing the mining...

I know it was transferred by rats but how did the plague get into the population in the first place? That's what I'm getting at. I don't actually know and wanted to see if anyone knew more than I did about the subject.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

"a recipe for disaster."

has that ever stopped man? look at that ancient ice, taunting us with its secrets, mother nature thinks she can hide shit from us? ***** you think you are still dealing with old Homo habilis? oh no, Homo fuckin' sapiens

This is what happens when you dig too deep; Ancient Bacteria isn't something to be messed with. Isn't that how the plague came about when we mined too far?

wow no, it was transmited by rats or rather their fleas, so unless they were the ones doing the mining...

I know it was transferred by rats but how did the plague get into the population in the first place? That's what I'm getting at. I don't actually know and wanted to see if anyone knew more than I did about the subject.

according to the all knowing oracle (wikipedia), it originated in the arid plains of central asia and spread via the silk road, atleast that seems to be the consensus, there no mention of any excavation, and even then the only reason this virus survived at all was because of the permafrost, something unlikely to exist in the the arid plains of central asia

 

[Eldritch Warlord]

Not the most science-y guy here, how do they know how old it is? I want to learn something today

Why do people just accept the age they state? They provide no proof. "Look, a 30,000 old virus!" "How do you know its that old?" "Because the ice is that old!" "How do you know the ice is that old?" "We just do!"

The abstract [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/02/26/1320670111.abstract] says that the permafrost was found to be ~30,000 years old via radiocarbon dating [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating]. This technique analyzes the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in dead plant matter compared to atmospheric levels to determine age.

Living plants have a C[sup]14[/sup]/C[sup]12[/sup] equal to the atmosphere but when they die the C[sup]14[/sup] decays into C[sup]12[/sup] at a constant rate. Historical atmospheric levels of both types of carbon can be known to a certain age (~50,000 years I think) through Arctic and Antarctic ice core samples. You can determine the age of any given depth in an ice core by simply counting the yearly freezes (much like tree rings).

 

[Ranorak]

I'm curious if they compared it's genetic sequence to all known viruses. (eh, who am I kidding, that's probably the first thing they do once they've sequenced it)

I'd like to know how far up the evolution ladder this baby is compared to modern day viruses.
Seeing as how it's so big, it might carry more genetic material. And if it does, I'm curious to see what was lost.