Deadly animal prion disease appears in Europe
Prions are a crazy, crazy phenomenon. From wikipedia:> A protein as a standalone infectious agent stands in contrast to all other known infectious agents such as viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites, all of which contain nucleic acids (DNA, RNA, or both)In my layman's understanding, they're like this bizarre edge case in the way proteins interact. Of all the myriad way a protien can fold, it happens to find one that induces the same malformation when it interacts with another protein. To me, it almost seems like as much of a mathematical/geometrical problem as a biological one. In any case, very interesting from the perspective of emergent behavior in complex systems.