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Alright Chelsea, I think we're gonna head back to one of our old favorite stomping grounds that is Vice News.

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I have an article here from January 31st, 2024.

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Article title, scientists discovered strange entities called obelisks in our bodies.

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Their purpose is a mystery.

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Their shapes? Obelisks? Our shapes?

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Obelisks.

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I...

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Obelisks are usually like towers, aren't they?

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That's I think what I would describe them as.

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This is written by Mercham Uskin.

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Yes, this calls for Google.

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And well, Chelsea, Google's what an obelisk is. I'll just start reading.

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Scientists...

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Paul Slender tapered monument.

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That's what I thought.

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Okay, in our bodies.

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Yeah, in our bodies.

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I'm just curious if it's everybody's bodies or just some people.

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And they have to go to the emergency room.

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Okay, I found an obelisk. This is...

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Do we have to go to the emergency room though? Maybe this article will tell us.

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Wait until we finish this story guys.

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Until the end of the Fringy Mini to decide whether or not you should be going to the hospital with your obelisk problem.

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I'm happy with that.

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Okay.

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Scientists have discovered strange entities hiding in our guts and mouths that may represent an entirely new class of life.

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If they are even alive, dubbed obelisks,

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these tiny rings of RNA can fold into structures that look like a rod, hence the name.

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They're also surprisingly commonplace in our microbiomes.

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The community of viruses, bacteria, fungi, and their genes that live in our bodies.

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Yet they've gone undetected until now and represent the latest discovery in an ever-growing list of mysterious, quote,

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genetic agents, end quote, hiding in plain sight.

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Indeed, the researchers who discovered them report that their function, if they have one, is a mystery.

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The obelisks were discovered by a team led by the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and pathologist Andrew Fire,

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who shared their findings in a preprint.

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Using a genome hunting filter they developed, researchers found just shy of 30,000 obelisks by scouring the integrative human microbiome project database.

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A dataset of microbiomes used by researchers worldwide to study human health and disease.

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When they searched other microbiome datasets from all over the world, then covered even more.

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In one dataset, 6.6% of gut samples and a whopping 53% of mouth samples contained obelisks.

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Quote, the prevalence and apparent novelty of these elements implies more is yet to be learned about their interplay with microbiome and human life.

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End quote. The author writes,

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Fire has previously declined to be interviewed given that the findings still need to be scrutinized by the scientific community in peer review.

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Obelisks represent their own class of organism, if you can even call them that as the paper refers them as a biological entity.

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They lie somewhere between virus and viroids, single-stranded, circular RNA that were thought to mostly infect plants, including wreaking havoc on weed crops.

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Although they look pretty similar, viroids can't make proteins of their own, whereas researchers discovered that obelisks can.

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These obelisks made proteins aren't like any proteins we know about today, which is why Fire's team named them obelins.

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Quote the name.

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Obelisks and obelins.

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Exactly what these obelins do for obelisks is just one of the plethora of questions researchers now have.

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Viruses too can make their own proteins, but they have a protective shell surrounding their genetic material unlike obelisks.

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Obelisks therefore need some kind of host. The researchers managed to identify one, a bacterium called Streptococcus Sanguinis.

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And it lives mostly in dental plaque in our mouth.

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Exactly which other host obelisks inhabit is yet another mystery, as are what they do to their host and how they spread.

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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,

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how these things evolve, and just how small and basic reproducing entities can be.

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It's still debatable whether viruses are alive, let alone something smaller and simpler.

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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.

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End quote, end of article.

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That's crazy.

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I don't know why they had to include Mark Peefer at the end there.

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I feel like they could have just written something without having to get a quote from somebody who's not related.

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But yeah, it's not life-changing in any way because it's something that we all have and have always had, I guess.

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So maybe don't go get your obelisks checked out at the hospital.

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Obelisks. Because it's totally normal, apparently.

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And I know it's a long time since this has come out now, but what are the implications for lay lines on this?

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I don't know.

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And I'm just worried about the obelisks.

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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.

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I'm sure it would.

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I'm sure it would open up a whole new world of help.

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But yeah, it's kind of funny. One of those things where it's like it's literally always been there.

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And we've existed plenty fine with it the way it is. Or at least I assume it's always been there.

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Maybe it did just show up and that's why they're only now just finding it.

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But, I'm sorry.

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Now that you say that I have obelisks.

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No, your obelisks are obelisks.

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I don't know if we can claim ownership of the obelisks.

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Okay, well, I'm feeling a little uncomfortable, but a little comforted knowing that that's what they are.

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They finally have a name.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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And anyhow, I just hope you guys, your obelisks and your obelisks are doing okay.

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Get your oblin levels checked. Make sure they're at the right levels.

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I think that sounds pretty good.

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Oh, for sure.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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That would be perfect.

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Yeah.

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Or for you.

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Yeah.

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Even.

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Bye, everybody.

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See you in 40 hours.

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