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Avian virus mutations

It was buried on Page 6 of the University of Wisconsin newspaper, Wisconsin Week, but it reads like front-page news: “Scientists find mutations that let bird flu adapt to humans.

A heat-loving microbe capable of fixing nitrogen at a surprisingly hot 92 degrees Celsius, or 198 Fahrenheit, may represent Earth’s earliest lineages of organisms capable of nitrogen fixation, perhaps even preceding the kinds of bacteria today’s plants and animals rely on to fix nitrogen.