The World's Largest Virus Was Just Resurrected From 34,000-Year-Old Permafrost

Not sure how wise it is to be thawing and playing with these things. I assume the logic is that they would just be thawing on their own eventually anyway, thanks to the changing climate.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/worlds-largest-virus-was-just-resur...

It does make you wonder what else could be lurking out there.

Ever see The Thing from Another World?

(I'm dating myself because there have already been two remakes of this, but the original is the best.)

I assume the logic is that they would just be thawing on their own eventually anyway, thanks to the changing climate.

Lysol howitzers 24/7.

I'm waiting for the first screenplay where global warming releases a formerly permafrosted virus that turns everyone into zombies, but just before all mankind is lost forever, someone figures out that this is how the dinosaurs died--they zombified.

(If that movie gets made, I so deserve a screen credit.)

People are so inherently cautious ;)

smallpox. i worry about smallpox out there in a lot of graveyards...

>7 pmackey: yeah, that's scary. I did some research and found that while the jury is still out on the possibility of smallpox survival, numerous efforts to uncover frozen corpses of smallpox victims have failed to discover any variola viruses. Corpses were unearthed that were so well preserved that the pox lesions were clearly visible. No viruses were found in these lesions, though fragments of the DNA were. Let's hope that stays the case!

>8 stellarexplorer:, I feel a lot better. Those were the stories I had in mind. I read The Coming Plague years ago and found it very sobering.

That was a pretty sobering book. But a very good read! Every time I see a mouse in the house I worry about Hantavirus.

>10 stellarexplorer: Me too!

Once upon a time one of my cats once brought home a live deer mouse. I freaked out quite a bit.

Once upon a time a neighbors dog, and this really happened, brought home a woman's hand. Needless to say the entire, very rural neighborhood was very upset. To the best of my knowledge the killer was never found although the rest of the body was found and identified.

ACK.
Just... ack.

Ack sounds apt. What animals brought home would probably be an interesting thread, though with a heavy ACK factor :0

Yes, ACK indeed. That was sometime around 1970 and I had not even thought about it in, well, decades until the cat / mouse story.

#7 Isn't that how scientists retrieved samples of the flu virus from 1918? By digging up the grave of someone who died and was buried in permafrost?

I have heard that corn proteins can be found in all Americans, directly incorporated into cells if I understood the article. So, what about prions that consist of twisted corn proteins? If there is no threat there I think there might at least be a story.