According to these personality tests, do personalities tend to fall on a Gaussian distribution centered around the mean for any given parameter, or do they separate into distinct peaks?

Fortunately, in the short term, this goal is inseparable from the goal of survival. It will be a very, very long time before we have the knowledge to even think about preventing heat death, so we've got to stay alive long enough for that knowledge to accumulate. And convincing people to survive is going to be an easier sell - although recent years have taught us that some people will resist even that.

It sounds like they're proposing that it happened to a greater extent than previously understood.

That's why they attack hospitals. Depending on the systems that are corrupted, lives may depend on resolving the problem as quickly as possible. Many hospitals have adapted by beefing up their IT department, but enough of them have just paid the ransom to make hospitals a profitable target.

Fortunately, both the snake and the child survived.

Rous sarcoma virus?

There are cases of transmissible cancers in animals, but these are mostly in highly bottlenecked populations with low genetic diversity (i.e., the cancer is less likely to seem foreign to a new host).

The few cases in humans involve a degree of immunosuppression.

So like the other poster said, it's not impossible, but it's pretty unlikely.

Water under the bridge.