7 ms·
What's an obelisk, anyway?
- andyadams222 3y ago[dead]
- frozenport 3y agoWhere are the TEM images of the proposed structures?
- NobleLie 3y agoConsidering it's predicted shape is that of obelisk ("rod") one is left to imagine that this finding has only metagenomics behind it.
- benjamin-lee 3y agoNot the author of this paper but am current PhD student focused on viroid discovery. There's no TEM but there are good methods such as RNAfold [0] for predicting their structures. In the case of rod-shaped RNAs, the prediction methods are quite good since it basically comes down to looking for substrings of reverse complement sequences within the circular RNA. [0]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1748-7188-6-26 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1748-7188-6-26
- frozenport 3y agoThe actual item is required to understand where it occurs and if these sequences have other explanations.
- helpfulContrib 3y ago[dead]
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoIf this turns out to be true, it's one of the most exciting basic biology findings in years. To discover a new type of organism, which seems to infect humans, or at least infects things that infect humans -- it's just amazing. How many mysterious diseases are caused by these things?
- chasil 3y agoIf you like that, then you will love gypsy transposons. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTR_retrotransposon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTR_retrotransposon
- mglz 3y agoEvery time I read about genetics I wonder "How can this work?! Why don't we have cancer all the time?". Then I remember we do have cancer all the time, our immune system is just pretty good at catching it before it becomes an issue. Then I stop thinking about the complexity horror that is biology and look at something simple, like a modern CPU.
- 0xEF 3y agoTo be fair, both of your examples are incredibly complex systems of relatively simple components. One just has the added bonus of throwing our mortality back in our faces, so the needed distraction is understandable.
- stainablesteel 3y agosounds pretty believable imo we would likely have the same kind of complicated relationship with obelisks that we have with gut microbiomes, and an ingestion of a ~1kb piece of rna into your stomach would be a pretty simple pro-biotic-like fix to gut-biome related problem and the life changes that can be made by altering it other than that hep d example it looks like they don't pose too much of a direct threat to us, they're probably not complex enough to. super interesting find
- thenerdhead 3y agoThe big question in my head is whether they are capable of causing disease. Sounds like a fascinating area of research regardless of the terrifying sublime.
- kurthr 3y agoAlternately, is their absence/imbalance a cause of disease. Are they simply part of the "biome"?
- thenerdhead 3y agoYep, that's a great point. The reason I would assume disease-causing is due to their comparisons to viroids which cause disease in plants.
- dang 3y ago[stub for offtopicness]
- bookofjoe 3y agoI honestly thought this was going to be a discussion of the Washington Monument.
- wkat4242 3y agoIt's a big French native from a tribe opposing the rule of Julius Caesar of course
- ithkuil 3y agoCelt. Franks came later from germany
- bigmattystyles 3y agoAre Gaul and Celt the same? In any case, he also fell in the magic potion when he was a kid. Loves wild boars.
- sigzero 3y agoYes - The Celts were the people spreading throughout Europe during the late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. They spoke the Celtic language and shared cultural and religious practices and beliefs. The Gauls were the Celtic tribes that settled in what the Romans called Gaul.
- wkat4242 3y agoI did not know that, thanks. And cool! That explains why they had some typical celtic things like druids.
- DylanSp 3y agoSorta kinda; "Celt"/"Celtic" is a broad term that's been applied to a lot of different peoples, languages, and cultures. The history blog ACOUP has a good post on it [1]; it's long, but only the first part is really relevant to what you're asking (up through the table comparing different regions). [1] https://acoup.blog/2023/05/12/collections-who-were-the-celts-and-how-did-they-some-of-them-fight/ https://acoup.blog/2023/05/12/collections-who-were-the-celts...