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This is pretty crazy. Researchers have discovered that a virus that normally only infects algae also infects about 40% of the people they tested. It was a small sample and all were from Baltimore, but the crazy parts are a) this virus would never have been expected to infect humans and b) that it slowed down the ability of people to process certain types of visual information by about 10%.
Story
Much more info at link.
Story
The virus, called ATCV-1, is a chlorovirus, a family of viruses that infect plants. This one affects algae — that green stuff that grows on water — in lakes all over the world. But as far as researchers knew before this, viruses like this very rarely cross from one kingdom like plants to another, like animals. And even when they do, it's more likely that they would go from plants to some type of invertebrate, not all the way to a complex animal like a human.
Here's the most interesting part (for most of us): Because the original study included cognitive tests, the scientists compared the data and saw that people with the virus living in their throats processed visual information about 10% slower than people without the virus — and this difference could not be explained by other factors like age, sex, race, socioeconomic status, education, place of birth, or smoking status.
The specific visual information tests in which a difference was shown included things like drawing a line that connected numbers in sequence that had been scattered on a page. People with the virus also seemed to have a shorter attention span.
To check if this group was somehow different from the general population, the team checked another 59 people for the virus. Out of the final 92, it was present in 40, about the same rate as in the initial, smaller group.
Much more info at link.