| dethalternate | Date: Sunday, 21-July-2013, 0:14 AM | Message # 1 |
-- dragon lord--
Group: Users
Messages: 3370
Status: Offline
| Giant viruses, more than twice as big as the last largest known viruses, have now been unearthed from sludge across the world, researchers say.
Even more titanic viruses might await discovery, the scientists said, and they may have features that could blur the lines between life and viruses, which are not considered to be living things.
the research team that discovered those giant viruses have unearthed two more that are even bigger. The shape of these new viruses, which resemble ancient Greek jars, reminded the scientists of the myth of Pandora's box, giving the germs their name -- pandoraviruses.
"The opening of the box will definitively break the foundations of what we thought viruses were," Chantal Abergel, research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Marseille, told LiveScience.
The new record-breaking viruses are visible with a traditional light microscope, being a full micrometer or millionth of a meter in size, or approximately a hundredth the width of a human hair. They also each possess a whopping roughly 2,500 genes.
Read more/FULL article/source - http://news.discovery.com/human....718.htm
|
| |
| |
