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Scientists Discover Something New Living Inside Us
Thousands of weird “obelisks” were found in our mouth and gut bacteria for the first time
I’ve spent most of my life assuming that, besides consciousness, scientists had pretty much figured out everything there was to know about the human body and how it works. Only since I started my newsletter did I learn how wrong my assumptions were. Because while science has figured out a lot, there are plenty of mysteries our bodies still hold.
Even more curious is that scientists are still discovering things about us — like the wave of death or that the cells in our body align with a mysterious pattern found throughout nature. And now researchers have found something entirely new and unexpected — strange, tiny obelisks living within bacteria in our mouths and guts. But they still aren’t sure what these obelisks do.
The Discovery
Stanford University biologist Andrew Fire, his graduate student Ivan Nikolay Zheludev, and Fire’s colleagues searched through an RNA database holding thousands of single-stranded circular RNA molecule sequences from human stools.
RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is similar to DNA except that while DNA has a double-stranded helix of “letters,” or base pairs, RNA has only a single…
