List of All Articles with Tag 'avi'

Pfizer reported a steep drop in profits Tuesday on much lower Covid-related revenues as it curtailed its full-year sales outlook, in part due to tornado...

U.S. auto safety regulators have opened another investigation into safety problems with Tesla vehicles

Pfizer Inc. missed revenue estimates for the second quarter as sales of its Covid pill fell drastically short

Bebe Rexha is so proud of her first-ever UK number one song that she keeps the award in her bedroom.

US and European officials are growing increasingly concerned about China’s accelerated push into the production of older-generation semiconductors

Energy giant BP says it earned nearly $2.6 billion in the second quarter

Listen to The Big Take podcast on iHeart, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Terminal. In what’s being hailed as a

Spend enough time with ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots and it doesn’t take long for them to spout falsehoods

Global shares are trading mixed as market optimism set off by a Wall Street rally got balanced by lingering worries about regional growth

If there’s one thing the Covid pandemic taught us, it’s that viruses shouldn’t be underestimated. People are, therefore, taking note after scientists discovered a whole new range of giant virus-like particles (VLP) that have taken on “previously unimaginable shapes and forms.” The microscopic agents, resembling everything from stars to monsters, were found in just a few handfuls of forest soil. The sample was collected from Harvard Forest, near Boston in the US back in 2019, and flown over to Germany’s Max Planck Institute. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter There, its contents were carefully examined and, at the end of last month, the findings were finally released. The team of researchers behind the investigation said that their discoveries “question our current understanding of the virosphere” and “imply that giant viruses employ a much wider array of [...] structures and mechanisms to interact with their host cells than is currently known.” In other words, the results prove how little we actually know about the universe of viruses that exist here on Earth. They also noted that the origins and functions of the different viral structures they found remain unknown – so there’s still plenty of mystery left to solve. The team at the Max Planck Institute, led by Dr Matthias Fischer, were amazed to find “an astounding diversity of virus-like particles (VLP)," in such a small sample. "Amazingly, we found that a few hundred grams of forest soil contained a greater diversity [of the structures] than that of all hitherto isolated giant viruses combined," they wrote. These included one type that resembled a supernova: Another that the teamed named the “haircut”: Another called the “turtle” morphotype: Another christened the “Christmas star”: And another called the “Gorgon” – named after the sisters with snakes for hair from Greek mythology: To clarify, VLP are molecules that closely resemble viruses, but they differ from them in one crucial way: they are non-infectious. This is because they contain no viral genetic material. Still, as virus-host systems, they are key to better understanding their potentially noxious counterparts. “[Our] findings imply that giant viruses employ a much wider array of [...] structures and mechanisms to interact with their host cells than is currently known,” the authors wrote. They ended their paper: “This fascinating window into the complex world of soil viruses leaves little doubt that the high genetic diversity of giant viruses is matched by diverse and previously unimaginable particle structures, whose origins and functions remain to be studied.” Clearly, there’s still plenty of work to be done. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

The recovery in Macau’s casino sector strengthened in July, with gaming revenue returning to about 68% of pre-pandemic

Toyota’s profit for the first fiscal quarter jumped to 1.3 trillion yen, or $9 billion, hitting a quarterly record for Japan’s top automaker