[vincekerrazzi]

I love seeing this kind of thing posted but it’s not surprising in the slightest. We’re forever discovering brew bacteria in our guts that are apparently unique. When I had my gut bacteria tested a full 20% of what I had hadn’t been named yet, and some possibly hadn’t been seen before.

[mmooss]

Archaea are not bacteria; that's why this discovery is so significant.

[rbanffy]

I find it shocking and disturbing that we know so little about our own biology we are still discovering such things.

It’s like doctors didn’t have centuries to examine human bodies to learn from them.

[PaulHoule]

It is not just the human body. Mysterious bacteria that people don't know how to cultivate in isolation are everywhere. Part of the story is that many bacteria don't really live alone but they depend on a plant or an animal or even other bacteria such as one species of large rod bacteria that has a different species of little rod bacteria that live on it, biofilms, etc.

[thegrim33]

I had an interesting experience recently where I was sick with a virus for an entire month, ending up in multiple urgent cares followed by the ER for 24 hours.

They took blood from me seemingly every 10 minutes and ran every test they could and in the end couldn't figure out what it was. The doctors (in a very major hospital in a very major city) didn't even seem surprised, they just shrugged and said I had some unknown virus that they didn't have a test for. The way they acted it seemed like a regular occurrence. Just some mystery virus.

It was just so shocking for me that there could be some virus out there that had me horribly sick for an entire month, much sicker than covid or the flu ever made me, and there's not even a test for it, it's just spreading out there doing its thing. Makes me wonder how little we really know.

[pfdietz]

One disturbing recent discovery is that a strain of E. coli produces a genotoxin, colibactin, that could be the cause of the doubling in colon cancer among those under age 55 in the last 20 years.

https://www.opb.org/article/2025/05/01/gut-bacteria-may-play...

[olau]

Biology is so complex that extremely little is known about details. Grab a college textbook on introduction to zoology, and prepare to be blown away.

[parasti]

Why do you find it shocking and disturbing? If you go to the doctor, the average process of diagnosis and treatment is much like printf debugging - just sprinkle some based on instinct and run it again. We're surrounded by technological advancement that is making us feel like we're far in the future, but there's still so much we don't know.

[DougN7]

How many of those centuries would they have been able to inspect, catalog, and widely distribute their findings about stuff as small as bacteria? The tools we have now are quite new, and still insufficient even now. Maybe in another 100 years we’ll have it all mapped out.