Quote:Deep within the Siberian permafrost, nearly 100 feet underneath the frozen ground, it sat dormant, for centuries and centuries. Above ground, the glaciers receded, ancient humans arrived, and eventually, civilization developed.
Now, it's been thawed and revived, thanks to a team of French scientists. It's a virus, and its zombie-like resurrection goes to show that the microbes can persist for far longer than scientists have previously imagined.
Quote:Until 2003, it was thought that all viruses were tiny - completely invisible under a standard light microscope and a fraction of the size of most bacterial cells. Since, several giant viruses have been discovered, including pandoraviruses, discovered by Claverie and Abergel in a water sample collected off the coast of Chile, which held the size record with a length of about one micrometer, or one-thousandth of a millimeter.
But their new virus Pithovirus sibericum, described in a paper published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is an astonishing 1.5 micrometers long, between 10 and 100 times as large as the average-sized virus. Under a microscope, it's easily visible as an oval rimmed by a dark black envelope with a perforated plug at the end, about the size of a bacterial cell.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-na...32/?no-ist
