Word: bacterias
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...MOST BACTERIA HAVE THE DECENCY TO BE MICROscopic. Epulopiscium fishelsoni is not among them. The newly identified one-celled macro-microorganism, which lives harmlessly in the intestine of the Red Sea-dwelling brown surgeonfish, is a full fiftieth of an inch long, large enough to be seen with the naked eye. Described in the current Nature, it is a million times as massive as the bacteria that inhabit the human...
Epulopiscium is notable for sheer grotesqueness, of course, but it also upsets some long-held scientific assumptions. For one, biologists had believed that bacteria could never be very large because, unlike one-celled animals (such as amoebas), they don't have the internal machinery to spread nutrients through their bodies. Now it appears that some fossilized traces of large microorganisms, which researchers presumed to be from animals, may have come from bacteria instead. If that's true, scientists know less than they thought about the early history of life on earth...
...pinpoint the source of the bacteria, the victim's DNA will be sequenced at Louisiana State University, and researchers will attempt to correlate the locations of victims...
...anthrax bacteria, which most commonly affects cattle, were found in lymph nodes which drain the lungs. This suggests that victims inhaled the anthrax spores. From there, the bacteria spread through the body...
...pretty confident that it was airborne [as opposed to being from meat]," Meselson said in a phone interview Saturday. "The most plausible source is the military base, and they do say they were working with [the anthrax bacteria] for a vaccine...