In the chilly depths of one of Antarctica's freshwater lakes, a surprising number of novel viruses thrive.

Researchers braved frigid temperatures to collect water samples from Lake Limnopolar, located on Livingston Island near the Antarctic Peninsula, and sequenced the genomes of the collected species. The new genetic study reveals some 10,000 species of viruses from a dozen families.

... The researchers also compared samples taken at different times of the year and found that come high summer (December in Antarctica), when the ice melts away from the lake's surface, many of the single-stranded DNA viruses had changed into double-stranded versions.

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Researchers have halted a fatal brain disease by delivering a therapeutic gene to the stem cells that mature into blood cells.

The gene was transferred using a virus derived from HIV, a technique that researchers have pursued for more than a decade but has not been successful in humans until now.

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