Worms living near Chernobyl nuclear plant have evolved to develop a ‘super power’
Scientists have made a fascinating new discovery about simple organisms living near the Chernobyl nuclear plant.
It sounds like something from countless movies and comic books – what if massive doses of radiation could radically mutate a species?
That’s the question being looked into by real-life researchers who visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, taking a closer look at nematodes there.
Nematodes are tiny (like, really tiny) worms that have extremely simple genetic makeups and are found pretty much everywhere on the planet.
A research team led by New York University published findings this week that suggest the nematodes in the Chernobyl area have indeed developed some interesting characteristics as a result of the famous nuclear disaster.
Unbelievably, despite generations of these worms being subjected to chronic radiation since the cataclysmic reactor meltdown in 1986, research suggests their genetic makeup has not been degraded or impacted.
This means their genomes were completely untouched, which cannot be said for other (generally larger) animal life that has been examined in the area since the disaster.
The study involved collecting worms from a variety of areas in the Exclusion Zone, mapping them against the differing levels of ambient radiation to see how this impacted on the worms.
The worms were then transported to a field laboratory where they were examined in a plethora of ways, including microscopically, and the researchers established that there were no signs of radiation damage on the nematodes’ genomes.
This has quite a few interesting ramifications, but the paper’s authors are keen to make sure no one gets the wrong end of the stick.
Pavel Gospodinov/Getty
Sophia Tintori, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Biology at NYU and the first author of the study, said: “This doesn’t mean that Chornobyl is safe – it more likely means that nematodes are really resilient animals and can withstand extreme conditions. We also don’t know how long each of the worms we collected was in the Zone, so we can’t be sure exactly what level of exposure each worm and its ancestors received over the past four decades.”
If that all sounds a bit like it’s interesting mostly from a worm’s point of view, there are potentially key bits of data that the team will try to work toward where humans are concerned.
In particular, it centers on the idea that knowing more about how these simple organisms repair their genomes and DNA damage could help us to develop a similar level of understanding about our own equivalent systems.
Given the overlap between radiation therapy and cancer treatment, for example, there’s clearly plenty of potentially valuable research to be done off the back of these findings.Featured Image Credit: Sophia Tintori / MediaProduction/Getty
World NewsScience
Published 12:44 17 May 2024 GMT+1
Man explores Britain’s incredible abandoned nuclear bunker network that most people didn’t know existed
This massive bunker network has been around since the Cold War.
Prudence Wade
Did you know there were hundreds of secret bunkers scattered all around the UK?
A new video from Scottish YouTuber Calum (@CalumRaasay) has explored the fascinating unknown story of these bunkers – while also giving us a peek at what they look like.
In the YouTube video, titled: ‘Britain’s Incredible Abandoned Nuclear Bunker Network’, Calum explains why these bunkers were set up.Play
During the Cold War, the British government was so concerned about the threat of nuclear war that they put a bit of a safety plan in action.
You might think these bunkers were set up to protect people from the fall-out of a potential attack, but it turns out they actually had a different purpose.
“These were intended to be used by the British government in the event of nuclear war, but perhaps not in the way that you might think,” Calum says in the YouTube video.
“They weren’t intended for survival and they certainly weren’t even really intended for much long-term use. Instead, they were a fascinating analogue network of nuclear reporting stations.”
Manned by volunteers from the United Kingdom Warning and Monitoring Organisation (UKMO), with help from the Royal Observer Corps (ROC), people in these bunkers scattered all over the UK would feed back information to the government. This included pre-warning them about attacks, while determining the impact sites and what the fallout levels were.
Calum goes into all sorts of fascinating detail – such as what tools the volunteers used, like the ground zero indicator and the bomb power indicator.
CalumRaasay / YouTube
He even visits a selection of these bunkers. Some have fallen into disrepair – they’re flooded and in all kinds of disarray – but others are in better condition.
Particularly the Skelmorlie Secret Bunker in Scotland, which has been perfectly preserved in its original condition, and is now a museum anyone can visit.
While many people have never heard of these bunkers, others have rushed to the comments section to share their personal connections.
“My mother was a member of the ROC back in the day and spent many hours inside one of them up here in Orkney. Apparently after being locked in there for a full 24 hours as part of an exercise, there wasn’t enough oxygen left in the air to sustain a match when one of the folk tried to light a cigarette at the end,” one commenter shared.
While another wrote: “Great video, excellent research. My father-in-law was one of those volunteers and went down to RAF Waddington to attend the parade to be stood down by HRH.”
