Group items tagged

Last month, researchers announced they were studying a 30,000-year-old giant virus called Mollivirus sibericum that they found in melted Siberian permafrost. The virus was functional and able to infect amoeba. This isn't the first time researchers have found big viruses that have challenged what we thought we knew about the tiny invaders. Mimivirus, discovered in 2003, has 1,200 genes and is twice the width of traditional viruses.

The CDC released travel health notices Tuesday that named two more places in which the disease has spread via mosquito bites: The US Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic.  The Zika virus is primarily transmitted by Aedes aegypti, the type of mosquito responsible for spreading dengue, yellow fever, and a whole host of other tropical infectious diseases. Originally identified in 1947 in Uganda, Zika was relatively unknown until 2007, when there was an outbreak of the virus in Micronesia. The mosquitoes pick up the virus from infected people, according to the CDC. 

"We risk being in a post-antibiotic world," said Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, referring to the urinary tract infection of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman who had not traveled within the prior five months. Frieden, speaking at a National Press Club luncheon in Washington, D.C., said the bacteria was resistant to colistin, an antibiotic that is reserved for use against "nightmare bacteria."

Research has shown that some older people stay sharp into old age and retain the ability to recall personal experiences with just as much accuracy as their middle-aged peers. The brains of these so-called "super-agers" look distinct, too: Their gray-matter-rich outer layer, or cortex, is thicker.

If the holy grail of medieval alchemists was turning lead into gold, how much more magical would it be to draw gold from, well, poop? It turns out that a ton of sludge, the goo left behind when treating sewage, could contain several hundred dollars' worth of metals-potentially enough to generate millions of dollars worth of gold, silver, and other minerals each year for a city of a million people.