{"id":206828,"date":"2025-02-20T06:16:13","date_gmt":"2025-02-20T12:16:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/cosmic-radiation-from-supernova-altered-virus-evolution-in-africa-study-suggests"},"modified":"2025-02-20T06:16:13","modified_gmt":"2025-02-20T12:16:13","slug":"cosmic-radiation-from-supernova-altered-virus-evolution-in-africa-study-suggests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/cosmic-radiation-from-supernova-altered-virus-evolution-in-africa-study-suggests","title":{"rendered":"Cosmic radiation from supernova altered virus evolution in Africa, study suggests"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/cosmic-radiation-from-supernova-altered-virus-evolution-in-africa-study-suggests.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Isolated by mountains along the East African Rift is Lake Tanganyika. More than 400 miles long, it is the continent\u2019s deepest lake and accounts for 16% of the world\u2019s available freshwater. Between 2 and 3 million years ago, the number of virus species infecting fish in that immense lake exploded, and in a new study, UC Santa Cruz researchers propose that this explosion was perhaps triggered by the explosion of a distant star.<\/p>\n<p>The new <a href=\"https:\/\/iopscience.iop.org\/article\/10.3847\/2041-8213\/ada27a\" target=\"_blank\">paper<\/a> published in <i>The Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/i>, led by recent undergraduate student Caitlyn Nojiri and co-authored by astronomy and astrophysics professor Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz and postdoctoral fellow No\u00e9mie Globus, examined iron isotopes to identify a 2.5 million-year-old supernova.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers connected this stellar explosion to a surge of radiation that pummeled Earth around the same time, and they assert that the blast was powerful enough to break the DNA of living creatures\u2014possibly driving those viruses in Lake Tanganyika to mutate into new species.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Isolated by mountains along the East African Rift is Lake Tanganyika. More than 400 miles long, it is the continent\u2019s deepest lake and accounts for 16% of the world\u2019s available freshwater. Between 2 and 3 million years ago, the number of virus species infecting fish in that immense lake exploded, and in a new study, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,385],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-evolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206828\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}