GIANT SQUIDS!!!!

First-ever observations of a live giant squid in the wild.

Kubodera T, Mori K.

The giant squid, Architeuthis, is renowned as the largest invertebrate in the world and has featured as an ominous sea monster in novels and movies. Considerable efforts to view this elusive creature in its deep-sea habitat have been singularly unsuccessful. Our digital camera and depth recorder system recently photographed an Architeuthis attacking bait at 900 m off Ogasawara Islands in the North Pacific. Here, we show the first wild images of a giant squid in its natural environment. Recovery of a severed tentacle confirmed both identification and scale of the squid (greater than 8 m). Architeuthis appears to be a much more active predator than previously suspected, using its elongate feeding tentacles to strike and tangle prey.

Proc Biol Sci. 2005 Dec 22;272(1581):2583-6.

NOTHING IS COOLER THAN THIS!!

 My heart is a big place where I keep feelings for my parents and brothers with the VIP room reserved for my wife. Secretly, I keep a second VIP room that holds my feelings for things like giant squids. Deep down, I know that if I dove into the ocean and swam around, a giant squid would show up and tell me the profound secrets of the deep. I would grab its tentacle and it would take me to a magical world where human fingers are used as currency and the Void calls to us all.

 As you can read from the abstract, the researchers were able to record a giant squid hunting and that is really cool. The particular squid that they observed was about 8 m long! To put that into real numbers, you would need 4.2 John Waynes to get the same length as the giant squid!

 When I think of giant sea creatures, I am reminded of the most devastating creatures ever:

STARRO!!!

 Starro is a gigantic starfish thing that floats in space until it reaches an inhabited planet. When it gets to the planet it releases tons of little Starros that begin feeding on the population to create more gigantic Starros.

Recently, Starro was revealed to be controlled by an alien that had subjugated the Starro queen, but I will not show it because it does not have the visual appeal of a gigantic starfish.

REVIEW: Detection, isolation, and continuous production of cytopathic retroviruses (HTLV-III) from patients with AIDS and pre-AIDS.

So, today's paper deals with a game changer: AIDS!!! 

 The CDC first reported some disease spreading through the gay community in 1981 with case reports from five gay men. It wasn't until 1983 that AIDS was shown to be a virus and today's paper is a major point in that history.
 So what did the researcher's do? Well, they looked at the symptoms of AIDS and saw a connection with human T-cell lymphotrophic retroviruses (HTLV). The connections were:

1. Feline leukemia virus causes immune deficiency in cats. This virus is similar to HTLVs known at the time.

2. Known HTLVs preferentially infect and kill helper T-cells.

3. HTLVs may be transmitted by intimate contact and blood products.

Well, what are the symptoms of AIDS that suggest HTLVs?

1. AIDS stands for ACQUIRED IMMUNODEFICIENCY SYNDROME!!! (see previous point 1)
2. AIDS patients have extremely reduced helper T-cell counts!! (see previous point 2)
3. People with multiple sex partners, people who share needles for intravenous drug use, and people who have received blood transfusions were among the infected!!! (see previous point 3)

 A continuous production was set up to isolate large amounts of virus particles and, ultimately, to characterize by reverse transcriptase!! What is reverse transcriptase? It turns out that HTLVs are retroviruses meaning that their genomes are RNA based instead of DNA based! Reverse transcriptase is an enzyme that can convert an RNA sequence into a DNA sequence.

 How did they set up a continuous production of the virus? Doesn't a virus infect, exploit, and then DESTROY?! How can you get continuous production? Well, it turns out that sometimes a virus can infect and instead of killing without reason the virus can integrate its DNA (after the action of reverse transcriptase) into the host (helper T-cell) genome. This integration allows the cell to live at least until the viral genome becomes activated and kills everything. Those living cells were co-cultured with cells that were killed by the virus. So, in summary, a cell line that can live with the virus is grown with cells that are killed by the virus and the death of the latter leads to large amounts of viral particles, allowing for characterization!! Characterization means that they:

1. Determined how quickly cells died after being infected, 6 days.

2. Tested antibody reactivity of AIDS positive patient serum to the virus, yes.

3. Compared of reverse transcriptase results with previous HTLV data, it matched.

4. Determined how novel the new HTLV (at the time dubbed HTLV-III) was when compared to HTLV-I and HTLV-II, somewhat.

 And that was how the causative agent of AIDS was uncovered. Sadly, we lost one of our greatest to AIDS: KLAUS NOMI!!!

 I'm sure that he is wondering where this crazy disease came from and a lot of other people have also wondered. Some explanations from the internet are:

Humans eating monkey meat! Humans kill the monkey and get monkey blood on themselves. Eventually, a human gets infected with a monkey virus and BAM AIDS!!

The CIA engineered a supervirus to kill blacks and gays to clean AMERICA!! I have no idea why an intelligence gathering agency would want to kill blacks or gays. That is weird.

Side effects include: permanent loss of immune system.

A drug company developing a vaccine to polio using monkeys to produce the virus. The vaccine may have worked, but when injected into humans, HTLV-III tagged along!