Worms frozen in permafrost for up to 42,000 years come back to life
siberiantimes.com
siberiantimes.com
There are shorter-term examples of frogs [0] (up to a few years) and tardigrades [1] (30 years) but I haven't heard of anything on this timescale before.
[0]http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-alaskan-...
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/18/10785002/water-bear-tardi...
Edit: formatting
From Wikipedia: Tardigrades are considered to be able to survive even complete global mass extinction events due to astrophysical events, such as gamma-ray bursts, or large meteorite impacts. Some of them can withstand extremely cold temperatures down to 1 K (−458 °F; −272 °C) (close to absolute zero), while others can withstand extremely hot temperatures up to 420 K (300 °F; 150 °C) for several minutes, pressures about six times greater than those found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than the lethal dose for a human, and the vacuum of outer space. They can go without food or water for more than 30 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce. Tardigrades that live in harsh conditions undergo an annual process of cyclomorphosis, allowing for survival in sub-zero temperatures.
https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/24/complicated-weird-beautif...
"Tier" would be an animal of sorts. "chen" is a common suffix for cutiefying something or indicate it's small (and adorable).
"Tierchen" would be a cute animal, usually a small one too.
The suffixes "-lein" und "-erl" function similarly but have been largely replaced in common german (though in southern germany, both are alive and well)
erl ... would be more related to the actual size
Sack -> Sackerl (bag -> small bag)
Wagen -> Wagerl (cart -> small cart)
Frau -> Fräulein (Woman -> Younger/Fragile woman (unmarried))
Wagen -> Wäglein (Cart -> smaller but also lesser cart)
Still viable? Almost certainly not. But it makes for a fun what if to ponder on the other option!
Then plants also qualify.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/02/120221-olde...
> Some 300 prehistoric worms were analysed - and two ‘were shown to contain viable nematodes’.
It's a tiny detail, but it's bugging me.
> We analyzed more than 300 samples of permafrost deposits of different ages and origins, buried soils and fossil rodent burrows. Two samples were shown to contain viable nematodes.
Why the article was published just now (the samples were taken in 2015) is a most interesting question. Probably related with the current rush to explore the martian ice pole to find life. The siberian experts would add a invaluable experience in how to attack this drill problem avoiding contamination of the sample, and taking a undisturbed core-layers of ice to date it and understand the past climate of mars.
I thought shock frosting meant -18°C.
Of all the model organisms, C. Elegans is far and away the most amazing.
> "Nematode found in mine is first subsurface multicellular organism"
> Until now, it was thought that the temperature, energy, oxygen and space constraints of the subsurface biosphere were too extreme for multicellular organisms. [2]
This is interesting news but I'm curious if this will be largely limited to this unique type of (multicellular) organism which can survive extreme conditions?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullis_Onstott
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/science/07obworm.html
Can anyone in Russia confirm if this is a legit news story? It's being repeated throughout tabloids in the West all referencing this English language Siberian publication, as well as hordes of definite news apsm sites, all appear to be using the same generic images and verbetium or almost verbetium text.
https://news.rambler.ru/other/40414227-chervi-s-kolymy-prish...
Edit - the paper says
>Some factors prevent the opportunity for nematodes to penetrate into permafrost strata many meters deep from the superposed modern tundra soil. The depth of seasonal thawing in the regions under study is up to 80 cm and was no more than 1.5 m even about 9000 years ago, during the Holocene Thermal Maximum.
and the samples were 30m down so they are arguing the worms couldn't make it though they have only carbon dated the general soil samples and not the worm bodies.
the affiliations list top Russian schools as well as Princeton.
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/10...
So that's at 13.1 degrees, quote from the end of that paper:
"Our results indicate that short fragments of DNA could be present for a very long time; at –5°C, the model predicts a half-life of 158 000 years for a 30 bp mtDNA fragment in bone (table 1). Even rough estimates such as this imply that sequenceable bone DNA fragments may still be present more than 1 Myr after deposition in deep frozen environments. It therefore seems reasonable to suggest that future research may identify authentic DNA that is significantly older than the current record of approximately 450–800 kyr from Greenlandic ice cores".
So even if they don't have a thermal model where you plug in any temperature and it will give you the half life there is good evidence that lower temperatures significantly increase the chances of DNA remaining intact for much longer than the above-zero half life would suggest.
Bacteria in the permafrost have been found to have been repairing their DNA for almost half a million years. IIRC they aren't really active, they don't reproduce at all, only a very minimal level of metabolism is maintained to repair occuring damage in the cell.
The Worms could be similar. Being frozen, they merely shut down everything but the absolute minimum of metabolism, likely powered by minute temperature differences or incoming light from the outside or many of the other options, just enough to keep the DNA and cell intact, the worm itself would likely be considered dead in it's frozen state.
But they are waiting.
At low temperatures (the lower you go) and low radiation (the lower you go) there is not enough energy in the system to exceed activation energy and break down DNA (meaning statistically it's extremely unlikely (arbitrarily) for enough energy to enter the system in a short enough period of time to break down the structure) (there's always the minuscule chance that some wavefunction posits enough energy into the system of course).
There are colonial organisms over 40,000 years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-living_organis...
Amber. 42mya.
Truly extraordinary claims require truly extraordinary evidence, and this one smells fishy, too. [1]
> Our interpretation of the phylogenetic tree constructed from 16S rRNA sequences (fig. 1b and SI table 3) suggests that isolates 41_AG11AC7 and 46_AG11AC9a are likely Staphylococcus species, which are not known to sporulate and are also common microorganisms on the human skin.
> The authors also fail to present negative control sequences to confirm that the DNA sequences presented within this study are not the results of laboratory or reagent contamination, rather than contamination that likely occurred in 1995
They didn't even do any control runs to calibrate their experiment! Sounds like junk science to me.
[1] https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/oup/backfile/Content_public/...
So, I just assume that this creature must've survived several hundreds of thousands of years by being frozen and only procreating when the earth becomes warm enough
It's like taking a DOS virus and expecting it to infect iphones :)
On the other hand I'm very afraid what will happen when people can download, tweak, and 3d-print viruses as a hobby.
I still believe the planetary ecosystem has a way of ridding itself of annoying biomass if a tipping point is reached. Who knows what will hit us and how fast it will hit us.
Permafrost viruses, dramatic temperature changes and generally more energy in the weather system due to global warming, catastrophic ocean acidification leading to the death of trillions and trillions of plankton, robbing us of oxygen to breathe.... there's likely a trove of "problems" we will face sooner rather than later.
Cached version at https://archive.is/b0WjK
(Why, other than personal animus, would this be downvoted?)
You think a 42,000 year old living human is just going to be left alone? There’s too much we can learn across a variety of subject matter to let that opportunity go to waste.
Such personal judgments are not valid reasons for a downvote.
> You think a 42,000 year old living human is just going to be left alone?
I said nothing of the sort. Of course she would not be left alone, any more than a mentally ill person who cannot function in society is left alone ... but we don't use them as guinea pigs. What I said was that performing experiments on her for the rest of her life would bring protests and would violate all sorts of ethical standards. It would be criminal, under current statutes.
> There’s too much we can learn across a variety of subject matter to let that opportunity go to waste.
A woman, even one 42,000 years old, is not merely an "opportunity", she's an autonomous person with human rights. But apparently the whole idea of the Enlightenment is naive.
Nope. Her life effectively ended 42,000 years ago. Her unfreezing would basically be her afterlife.
Everything she ever knew would be dead and gone, the world would have completely changed. If we could figure out how she survived a 42,000 year freeze, it basically opens us up to interstellar space travel and expansion, even without FTL speeds. The benefits to humanity are far too great to pass them up for the selfish needs of a single individual, even if she cannot comprehend her important contribution to science.
It's remarkable that this is not a parody. Much (critical) has been written about this attitude, which led to the Tuskegee study and other atrocities. Again, what you are suggesting is criminal. I won't comment further.
https://mobile.twitter.com/doreen_michele/status/10226461705...
It's also used as a crutch when your eyesight slowly degrades over the years.
Sometimes it leads to Freudian slips, other times, you just expect to read about people instead of worms.