European royalty were pretty much the opposite of “a long period of low-level inbreeding”, so no.

Certainly it’s possible, though not inevitable. Small inbred populations can persist in spite of small founder populations - the classic examples are island foxes, and island populations are the best studied.

Populations can survive inbreeding better if they have a longish history of smallish (but not too small) populations. This leads to long periods of low-level inbreeding, and that leads to purging of deleterious genes. In other words, a long period of mild inbreeding can accidentally prepare a population for a shorter period of severe inbreeding.

Moose are actually good candidates for this, because they arose during periods of glaciation, which presumably led to small populations that would alternate periods of inbreeding and then as the ice allowed intermingling and new gene flow.

Is this what actually happened? I don’t know, but the principles are pretty well understood and if your question is could this happen, certainly it could. Since there obviously are moose on Newfoundland, the alternative is denying reality or positing some clandestine moose-smuggling operation, so this is the simplest answer.

Further reading:

• Population genetic structure and the effect of founder events on the genetic variability of moose, Alces alces, in Canada
• Genetic variation and population structure of moose ( Alces alces ) at neutral and functional DNA loci

Most trials like this have interim reviews for exactly this reason. They take unfinished data at intervals - say, if it’s a 5-year study, they may look at 1 year in and so on - to see if the unknown treatment has already reached a statistically significant improvement over the standard of care (the usual control). If it has, the trial can be stopped early, and all the controls switched to the new med (or conversely if the test is significantly worse they can be switched back to standard treatment).

That way, you first ensure that everyone in your trial is getting at least the current best treatment, and are able to switch over as fast as possible.

It’s pretty unusual for new treatments to be that significantly better; incremental improvement is the norm (but like compound interest, small improvements every year for 50 years can lead to the dramatic improvement in, say, many cancer treatments that we see).

If you’re wondering why we even bother with clinical trials when we know something is going to be da bomb, we are really good at “knowing” wrong - even scientists deep in the field often have incorrect expectations. It’s probably much more common to stop trials early because the test med is worse than standard of care, than because they’re even better than expected.

They're phagocytosed and broken down to components that can be recycled.

Viruses can be destroyed outside cells: Often by antibodies, but also by defenses like complement or innate immune lectins. In most cases these defenses physically stick to the outside of the virion and mark it for destruction by neutrophils, macrophages, or other specialized phagocytic cells. Phagocytosis means that the virion is taken up by these cells, and moved into extremely destructive little compartments that include acids and aggressive enzymes that break down proteins and nucleic acids down to their component parts. The resulting fragments can be recycled by the cell, or simply flushed out of the body.

Viruses can also be destroyed when they're infecting a cell. In this case the usual route is to destroy the infected cell, either by breaking it open or by forcing it into a specialized death pathway (apoptosis, or related pathways). In either case, the resulting cell debris is taken up by phagocytic cells and recycled or flushed.

Square brackets around the text (e.g. title) followed by regular brackets around the link.

[Migratory Orientation in the Indigo Bunting, Passerina cyanea. Part II: Mechanism of Celestial Orientation](https://academic.oup.com/auk/article/84/4/463/5198008)

> I propose that Indigo Buntings are able to determine their migratory direction in a similar manner, by responding to the Gestalt stimuli provided by the patterning of stars

—Migratory Orientation in the Indigo Bunting, Passerina cyanea. Part II: Mechanism of Celestial Orientation

There are three possibilities for irrelevant structures, as far as evolution is concerned:

• they’re useless, but completely harmless.
• they’re useless, but passively harmful - they use energy or resources that could be used elsewhere.
• they’re useless, and actively harmful.

The effect of the third possibility is obvious. Individuals that disrupt that harmful thing do better, reproductively. Mutations that prevent the harmful thing from forming are selected, just likely any other positive selection, and the disrupted version spreads through the population.

The second option may be harder to visualize, but it leads to exactly the same outcome. Forming an organ you don’t need uses resources; maintaining a non-helpful organ uses energy. If you can divert those resources and that energy to, say, earlier reproduction, you’ve got a positive selection trigger that will spread through the population.

If something is useless, but harmless, then there won’t be any positive selection in disrupting it. (Also, it’s possible in the second case that the positive selection is so weak that it won’t spread particularly quickly, and that comes down to this case.).

But mutations happen all the time. We are all born with dozens of mutations, almost all harmless or nearly so. Those who are born with harmful mutations have them negatively selected. Harmless mutations just hang around, because they aren’t selected against.

If a mutation hits our now useless structure, there’s no selection against that mutation - neither negative nor positive. If there’s no negative selection against mutations, then very gradually, just through genetic drift, the structure will slowly accumulate mutations and gradually, just through drift, become slowly and randomly inactivated.

Nails are a bad example here because they do have positive value to us - not ripping apart food, but supporting touch and gripping, for example. A better, classic example is the vitamin C production system in fruit-eating primates. Because fruit is rich in vitamin C, there was no value to those primates in keeping the system, but it was also pretty much harmless, not using significant resources. Over time, genetic drift allowed mutations to accumulate in the enzymes involved and the system stopped working - causing no harm, but no benefit either.

(Some people argue that inactivating the vitamin C pathway does have a small positive value, but the principle is there anyway.)

Bacteria are definitely found in rain, though not at high concentrations:

> Rain samples were collected in sterilized 3-L beakers equipped with sterilized homemade stainless steel rain collectors. … All of the materials used for sampling were sterilized by autoclaving, and a sterile mask and gloves were worn during sample collection to avoid any potential contamination. … DNA analysis by Sanger sequencing was carried out for these particles >220 nm in the 9 rainwater samples. No isolated strain culture test was carried out. A total of 908 bacterial clones and 470 fungal clones were generated across all samples. … Pseudomonas, composed of numerous species of highly IN active bacteria, was detected in four samples (July 2013, July 2012, August 2012 and August 2011), accounting for 25%, 2%, 6%, and 7% of each sample sequence, respectively.

—Evidence for a missing source of efficient ice nuclei

It’s been proposed that bacteria are important for ice nucleation in the atmosphere, and may have an important role in forming clouding and triggering precipitation.

> It has been known for several decades that some bioaerosols, such as ice-nucleation-active (INA) bacteria, especially Pseudomonas syringae strains, may play a critical potential role in the formation of clouds and precipitation.

—Evidence for a missing source of efficient ice nuclei

But it still seems unclear how important they are, if at all.