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Tag Archives: undiscovered
Langya henipavirus: New virus found in China could be ‘tip of the iceberg’ for undiscovered pathogens, researchers say
The virus, dubbed Langya henipavirus, infected nearly three dozen farmers and other residents, according to a team of scientists who believe it may have spread directly or indirectly to people from shrews — small mole-like mammals found in a wide variety of habitats.
The pathogen did not cause any reported deaths, but was detected in 35 unrelated fever patients in hospitals in Shandong and Henan provinces between 2018 and 2021, the scientists said — a finding in tune with longstanding warnings from scientists that animal viruses are regularly spilling undetected into people around the world.
“We are hugely underestimating the number of these zoonotic cases in the world, and this (Langya virus) is just the tip of the iceberg,” said emerging virus expert Leo Poon, a professor at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health, who was not involved in the latest study.
However, the researchers say there is no evidence the Langya virus is spreading between people or that it had caused a local outbreak of connected cases. More study on a larger subset of patients is needed to rule out human-to-human spread, they added.
Veteran emerging infectious disease scientist Linfa Wang, who was part of the research team, told CNN that although the new virus was unlikely to evolve into “another ‘disease X’ event,” such as a previously unknown pathogen that sparks an epidemic or pandemic, “it does demonstrate that such zoonotic spillover events happen more often than we think or know.”
In order to reduce the risk of an emerging virus becoming a health crisis, “it is absolutely necessary to conduct active surveillance in a transparent and internationally collaborative way,” said Wang, a professor at the Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School.
Tracking a new virus
The first clues to the presence of a novel virus emerged when a 53-year-old farmer sought treatment at a hospital in Shandong province’s Qingdao city in December, 2018 with symptoms including a fever, headache, cough and nausea, according to documentation from the researchers.
As the patient indicated she had contact with animals within the past month, she was enrolled in additional screening being conducted across three hospitals in eastern China focused on identifying zoonotic diseases.
When this patient’s test samples were examined, scientists found something unexpected — a virus that had never been seen before, related to the Hendra and Nipah viruses, highly fatal pathogens from a family not typically known for easy human-to-human spread.
Over the next 32 months, researchers across the three hospitals screened for this virus in similar patients, ultimately detecting it in 35 people, who had a range of symptoms included cough, fatigue, headache, and nausea, in addition to fever.
Nine of those patients were also infected with a known virus, like influenza, so the source of their symptoms was unclear, but researchers believe symptoms in the remaining 26 could have been cased by the novel henipavirus.
Some displayed severe symptoms like pneumonia or abnormalities of thrombocytopenia, a blood platelet condition, according to Wang, but their symptoms were a far cry those seen in Hendra or Nipah patients, and no one among the group died or was admitted to the ICU. While all recovered, they weren’t monitored for longer-term problems, he added.
Of that group of 26, all but four were farmers, and while some were flagged by the same hospital as the initial case detected, many others were found in Xinyang, more than 700 kilometers (435 miles) away in Henan.
Because similar viruses were known to circulate in animals from southwestern China to South Korea it was “not surprising” to see spillover into humans occurring across such long distances, Wang explained.
There was “no close contact or common exposure history among the patients” or other signs of human-to-human spread, Wang and his colleagues wrote in their findings. This suggests cases were sporadic, but more research was needed, they said.
Once they knew a new virus was infecting people, the researchers, who included Beijing-based scientists and Qingdao disease control officials, got to work to see if they could uncover what was infecting the patients. They tested domesticated animals where patients lived for traces of past infection with the virus, and found a small number of goats and dogs that may have had the virus previously.
But the real breakthrough came when they tested samples taken from small wild animals captured in traps — and found 71 infections across two shrew species, leading the scientists to suggest these small, rodent-like mammals could be where the virus naturally circulates.
What remains unclear is how the virus got into people, Wang said.
Further studies screening for Langya henipavirus would follow and should be conducted not only in the two provinces were the virus was found, but more widely within China and beyond, he said.
China’s National Health Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether monitoring for new infections of the virus was ongoing.
Risk reduction
Globally, 70% of emerging infectious diseases are thought to have passed into humans via contact with animals, in a phenomenon scientists say has accelerated as growing human populations expand into wildlife habitats.
China has seen major outbreaks from emerging viruses in the past two decades, including SARS in 2002-2003 and Covid-19 — both first detected in the country and from viruses thought to originate in bats.
The devastating effects of both diseases — particularly Covid-19 that has to date killed more than 6.4 million people worldwide — demonstrate the importance of identifying cases of novel viruses quickly, and sharing the information about potential risks.
Scientists not involved in the new research agreed more work was needed to understand the Langya virus and confirm the latest findings, and said the discovery underlined the importance of tracking which viruses may be spreading from animals to people.
“Because this (new henipavirus) may not be only circulating in China, sharing this information and allowing others to get prepared or do some further investigation in their own countries is important,” said Poon in Hong Kong.
Scientists say critical questions need to be answered about how widespread the new virus may be in nature, how it is spilling into people and how dangerous it is to human health — including the potential for it to spread between people or gain this ability if it continues to jump from animals into humans.
The geographic span of where the infections have been found “suggests that this infection risk is rather widespread,” said virologist Malik Peiris, also of the University of Hong Kong, adding studies elsewhere in China and neighboring countries were important “to ascertain the geographic range of this virus in the animals (shrews) and in humans.”
He, too, said the latest findings hinted at the large number of undetected infections spilling over from wildlife to people, and the need for systematic studies to understand not just this virus, but the broader picture of human infection with viruses from wildlife.
“This is important so that we are not taken unawares by the next pandemic, when — not if — it comes,” he said.
Does it portend an undiscovered planet?
Michigan State University’s Seth Jacobson and colleagues in China and France have unveiled a new theory that could help solve a galactic mystery of how our solar system evolved. Specifically, how did the gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—end up where they are, orbiting the sun like they do?
The research also has implications for how terrestrial planets such as Earth were formed and the possibility that a fifth gas giant lurks 50 billion miles out into the distance.
“Our solar system hasn’t always looked the way that it does today. Over its history, the orbits of the planets have changed radically,” said Jacobson, an assistant professor in the College of Natural Science’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “But we can figure out what’s happened.”
The research, published in the journal Nature on April 27, offers an explanation for what happened to gas giants in other solar systems and ours.
It’s a Nice model
Stars are born from massive, swirling clouds of cosmic gas and dust. Once our sun ignited, the early solar system was still filled with a primordial disk of gas that played an integral role in the formation and evolution of the planets, including the gas giants.
In the late 20th century, scientists began to believe that the gas giants initially circled the sun in neat, compact, evenly-spaced orbits. Jupiter, Saturn and the others, however, have long settled into orbits that are relatively oblong, askew and spread out.
So the question for researchers now is “Why?”
In 2005, an international team of scientists proposed an answer to that question in a trio of landmark Nature papers. The solution was originally developed in Nice, France and is known as the Nice model. It posits that there was an instability among these planets, a chaotic set of gravitational interactions that ultimately set them on their current paths.
“This was a tectonic shift in how people thought about the early solar system,” Jacobson said.
The Nice model remains a leading explanation, but over the past 17 years, scientists have found new questions to ask about what triggers the Nice model instability.
For example, it was originally thought that the gas giant instability took place hundreds of millions of years after the dispersal of that primordial gas disk that birthed the solar system. But newer evidence, including some found in moon rocks retrieved by the Apollo missions, suggests it happened more quickly. That also raises new questions about how the interior solar system that’s home to Earth evolved.
Working with Beibei Liu from Zhejiang University in China and Sean Raymond from the University of Bordeaux in France, Jacobson has helped find a fix that has to do with how the instability started. The team has proposed a new trigger.
“I think our new idea could really relax a lot of tensions in the field because what we’ve proposed is a very natural answer to when did the giant planet instability occur,” Jacobson said.
The new trigger
The idea started with a conversation Raymond and Jacobsen had back in 2019. They theorized the gas giants may have been set on their current paths because of how the primordial gas disk evaporated. That could explain how the planets spread out much earlier in the solar system’s evolution than the Nice model originally posited and perhaps even without the instability to push them there.
“We wondered whether the Nice model was really necessary to explain the solar system,” Raymond said. “We came up with the idea that the giant planets could possibly spread out by a ‘rebound’ effect as the disk dissipated, perhaps without ever going unstable.”
Raymond and Jacobsen then reached out to Liu, who pioneered this rebound effect idea through extensive simulations of gas disks and large exoplanets—planets in other solar systems—that orbit close to their stars.
“The situation in our solar system is slightly different because Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are distributed on wider orbits,” Liu said. “After a few iterations of brainstorm sessions, we became aware that the problem could be solved if the gas disk dissipated from the inside out.”
The team found that this inside-out dissipation provided a natural trigger for the Nice model instability, Raymond said.
“We ended up strengthening the Nice model rather than destroying it,” he said. “This was a fun illustration of testing our preconceived ideas and following the results wherever they lead.”
With the new trigger, the picture at the beginning of the instability looks the same. There’s still a nascent sun surrounded by a cloud of gas and dust. A handful of young gas giants revolve around the star in neat, compact orbits through that cloud.
“All solar systems are formed in a disk of gas and dust. It’s a natural byproduct of how stars form,” Jacobson said. “But as the sun turns on and starts burning its nuclear fuel, it generates sunlight, heating up the disk and eventually blowing it away from the inside out.”
This created a growing hole in the cloud of gas, centered on the sun. As the hole grew, its edge swept through each of the gas giants’ orbits. This transition leads to the requisite giant planet instability with very high probability, according to the team’s computer simulations. The process of shifting these large planets into their current orbits also moves fast compared with Nice model’s original timeline of hundreds of millions of years.
“The instability occurs early as the sun’s gaseous disk dissipated, constrained to be within a few million years to 10 million years after the birth of the solar system,” Liu said.
The new trigger also leads to the mixing of material from the outer solar system and the inner solar system. The Earth’s geochemistry suggests that such a mixing needed to happen while our planet is still in the middle of forming.
“This process is really going to stir up the inner solar system and Earth can grow from that,” Jacobson said. “That is pretty consistent with observations.” Exploring the connection between the instability and Earth’s formation is a subject of future work for the group.
Lastly, the team’s new explanation also holds for other solar systems in our galaxy where scientists have observed gas giants orbiting their stars in configurations like what we see in our own.
“We’re just one example of a solar system in our galaxy,” Jacobson said. “What we’re showing is that the instability occurred in a different way, one that’s more universal and more consistent.”
Planet 9 from outer space
Although the team’s paper doesn’t emphasize this, Jacobson said the work has implications for one of the most popular and occasionally heated debates about our solar system: How many planets does it have?
Currently, the answer is eight, but it turns out that the Nice model worked slightly better when the early solar system had five gas giants instead of four. Sadly, according to the model, that extra planet was hammer-thrown from our solar system during the instability, which helps the remaining gas giants find their orbits.
In 2015, however, Caltech researchers found evidence that there may yet be an undiscovered planet tooling around the outskirts of the solar system some 50 billion miles from the sun, about 47 billion miles farther out than Neptune.
There’s still no concrete proof that this hypothetical planet—nicknamed Planet X or Planet 9—or the Nice model’s “extra” planet actually exist. But, if they do, could they be one and the same?
Jacobson and his colleagues couldn’t answer that question directly with their simulations, but they could do the next best thing. Knowing their instability trigger correctly reproduces the current picture of our solar system, they could test whether their model works better starting with four or five gas giants.
“For us, the outcome was very similar if you start with four or five,” Jacobson said. “If you start with five, you’re more likely to end up with four. But if you start with four, the orbits end up matching better.”
Either way, humanity should have an answer soon. The Vera Rubin Observatory, scheduled to be operational by the end of 2023, should be able to spot Planet 9 if it is out there.
“Planet 9 is super controversial, so we didn’t stress it in the paper,” Jacobson said, “But we do like to talk about it with the public.”
It’s a reminder that our solar system is a dynamic place, still full of mysteries and discoveries waiting to be made.
Simulations suggest an Earth or Mars size planet may be lurking out beyond Neptune
More information:
Beibei Liu et al, Early Solar System instability triggered by dispersal of the gaseous disk, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04535-1
Beibei Liu et al, Early Solar System instability triggered by dispersal of the gaseous disk, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04535-1
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The instability at the beginning of the solar system: Does it portend an undiscovered planet? (2022, April 27)
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Meteorite hunters rejoice: Antarctica probably harbors 300,000 undiscovered space rocks
An artificial intelligence program suggests there may be hundreds of thousands of meteorites left for scientists to discover on the icy fields of Antarctica and reveals what may be the most likely places to unearth them, a new study finds.
Nearly two-thirds of all meteorites recovered on Earth originate in Antarctica. The cold, dry nature of the frozen continent helps preserve these extraterrestrial rocks, and the dark colors of these stones make them stand out against ice and snow. Meteorites were originally part of planetary bodies, and so these space rocks from the bottom of the world have yielded many valuable clues about the nature, origins and evolution of the rest of the solar system.
When meteorites fall on Antarctica, they usually land in the snow-covered regions that span 98% of the continent. Over time, snow accumulates there, compacts and becomes ice, embedding these space rocks within ice sheets that flow toward the margins of the continent.
Mars meteorites: Pieces of the Red Planet on Earth (photos)
Most ice-entrapped Antarctic meteorites end up in the ocean. However, some of them get concentrated on the surface of these ice sheets in areas of “blue ice,” where wind and other factors can result in bare ice with an azure hue.
If the way the Antarctic ice is flowing and other features of the climate and terrain are right, meteorites can remain exposed on the surface of blue ice, where researchers can easily recover them during field missions. Nearly all Antarctic meteorites found to date were recovered from blue ice areas.
Many of today’s known meteorite-rich blue ice areas were found by sheer luck and past experience on costly reconnaissance missions. Now scientists have developed a new strategy based on artificial intelligence.
“We found some unexplored areas with a great potential to find meteorites,” study lead author Veronica Tollenaar, a glaciologist at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, told Space.com.
In the new study, researchers had artificial intelligence software analyze satellite data of the entire surface of Antarctica. Their aim was to identify the zones most likely to harbor as-yet-undiscovered meteorites on the frozen continent based on their similarities to areas where scientists had previously unearthed space rocks. They focused on optical, thermal and radar data of surface features such as temperature, slope and velocity of the ice.
The AI program accurately identified nearly 83% of known meteorite-rich Antarctic zones. All in all, it identified more than 600 potentially meteorite-rich zones on the continent, including many currently unexplored ones, a number of which are relatively close to existing research stations on Antarctica.
“By visiting these locations and using new recovery techniques in the field, such as surveys with drones, we are about to enter a new era of Antarctic meteorite recovery missions,” Tollenaar said.
The new findings suggest that the more than 45,000 meteorites recovered to date from Antarctica comprise just 5% to 13% of all the meteorites there. “Our calculations suggest that more than 300,000 meteorites are still present at the surface of the ice sheet,” Tollenaar said. “The potential remains enormous.”
Given that their AI program is not 100% accurate, researchers might sometimes go to a site the software found promising and not discover any meteorites, Tollenaar cautioned. Still, although unsuccessful missions will prove disappointing, their data will hopefully help refine the AI to make it better in the future, she said.
The scientists detailed their findings online Wednesday (Jan. 26) in the journal Science Advances. They also explain the results in a very user-friendly way at this website.
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