Alright Chelsea, I think we're gonna head back to one of our old favorite stomping grounds that is Vice News. I have an article here from January 31st, 2024. Article title, scientists discovered strange entities called obelisks in our bodies. Their purpose is a mystery. Their shapes? Obelisks? Our shapes? Obelisks. I... Obelisks are usually like towers, aren't they? That's I think what I would describe them as. This is written by Mercham Uskin. Yes, this calls for Google.
And well, Chelsea, Google's what an obelisk is. I'll just start reading. Scientists... Paul Slender tapered monument. That's what I thought. Okay, in our bodies. Yeah, in our bodies. I'm just curious if it's everybody's bodies or just some people. And they have to go to the emergency room. Okay, I found an obelisk. This is... Do we have to go to the emergency room though? Maybe this article will tell us. Wait until we finish this story guys.
Until the end of the Fringy Mini to decide whether or not you should be going to the hospital with your obelisk problem. I'm happy with that. Okay. Scientists have discovered strange entities hiding in our guts and mouths that may represent an entirely new class of life. If they are even alive, dubbed obelisks, these tiny rings of RNA can fold into structures that look like a rod, hence the name. They're also surprisingly commonplace in our microbiomes.
The community of viruses, bacteria, fungi, and their genes that live in our bodies. Yet they've gone undetected until now and represent the latest discovery in an ever-growing list of mysterious, quote, genetic agents, end quote, hiding in plain sight. Indeed, the researchers who discovered them report that their function, if they have one, is a mystery.
The obelisks were discovered by a team led by the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and pathologist Andrew Fire, who shared their findings in a preprint. Using a genome hunting filter they developed, researchers found just shy of 30,000 obelisks by scouring the integrative human microbiome project database. A dataset of microbiomes used by researchers worldwide to study human health and disease. When they searched other microbiome datasets from all over the world, then covered even more.
In one dataset, 6.6% of gut samples and a whopping 53% of mouth samples contained obelisks. Quote, the prevalence and apparent novelty of these elements implies more is yet to be learned about their interplay with microbiome and human life. End quote. The author writes, Fire has previously declined to be interviewed given that the findings still need to be scrutinized by the scientific community in peer review.
Obelisks represent their own class of organism, if you can even call them that as the paper refers them as a biological entity. They lie somewhere between virus and viroids, single-stranded, circular RNA that were thought to mostly infect plants, including wreaking havoc on weed crops. Although they look pretty similar, viroids can't make proteins of their own, whereas researchers discovered that obelisks can.
These obelisks made proteins aren't like any proteins we know about today, which is why Fire's team named them obelins. Quote the name. Obelisks and obelins. Exactly what these obelins do for obelisks is just one of the plethora of questions researchers now have. Viruses too can make their own proteins, but they have a protective shell surrounding their genetic material unlike obelisks.
Obelisks therefore need some kind of host. The researchers managed to identify one, a bacterium called Streptococcus Sanguinis. And it lives mostly in dental plaque in our mouth. Exactly which other host obelisks inhabit is yet another mystery, as are what they do to their host and how they spread.
In the past three years, scientists have discovered tens of thousands of new viroid-like entities, and it's made them completely re-evaluate how they classify the microscopic world, how these things evolve, and just how small and basic reproducing entities can be. It's still debatable whether viruses are alive, let alone something smaller and simpler.
It's insane, said Mark Peefer, a cell and developmental biologist at the University of Carolina, at Chapel Hill, and he also stated the more we look, the more crazy things we see. End quote, end of article. That's crazy. I don't know why they had to include Mark Peefer at the end there. I feel like they could have just written something without having to get a quote from somebody who's not related.
But yeah, it's not life-changing in any way because it's something that we all have and have always had, I guess. So maybe don't go get your obelisks checked out at the hospital. Obelisks. Because it's totally normal, apparently. And I know it's a long time since this has come out now, but what are the implications for lay lines on this? I don't know. And I'm just worried about the obelisks.
And if you go to the emergency room screaming that your obelisks and their obelisks are wrong or something like that, I think it opens up a whole new world of ways that they will help you at the hospital. I'm sure it would. I'm sure it would open up a whole new world of help. But yeah, it's kind of funny. One of those things where it's like it's literally always been there. And we've existed plenty fine with it the way it is. Or at least I assume it's always been there.
Maybe it did just show up and that's why they're only now just finding it. But, I'm sorry. Now that you say that I have obelisks. No, your obelisks are obelisks. I don't know if we can claim ownership of the obelisks. Okay, well, I'm feeling a little uncomfortable, but a little comforted knowing that that's what they are. They finally have a name. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And anyhow, I just hope you guys, your obelisks and your obelisks are doing okay.
Get your oblin levels checked. Make sure they're at the right levels. I think that sounds pretty good. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That would be perfect. Yeah. Or for you. Yeah. Even. Bye, everybody. See you in 40 hours. music