Scientists Have Revived A 48,500-Year-Old ‘Zombie Virus’ From The Melting Siberian Arctic, Because Why The Hell Not?

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Fox News - International scientists are warning that the irreversible thawing of permafrost due to climate change could lead to a new public health threat. 

In an article posted to the preprint repository bioRxiv – which has yet to be peer-reviewed – the French, Russian and German researchers said they had revived and uncovered 13 new "zombie viruses" isolated from seven different ancient Siberian permafrost samples. 

One virus had been dormant and frozen underwater for nearly 50,000 years. The authors found that the pathogens remain infectious after tens of thousands of years.

Before Covid, and all the other insanity that's ensued in this simulation we're living in, I would have cursed these scientists and screamed "what are they doing!?"

But having passed the test that Covid posed as a species with flying colors, now I say bring it the fuck on.

There's a famous saying that "curiosity killed the cat" that you might think would apply here. Well, I'm here to tell you it doesn't because, last time I checked, there are no feline scientists in America. Which means there definitely aren't any in Russia. Also, our scientists never miss. So if they want to  ̶o̶p̶e̶n̶ ̶u̶p̶ ̶p̶a̶n̶d̶o̶r̶a̶'̶s̶ ̶b̶o̶x̶ untrap a dormant 50,000 virus that probably wiped out whatever civilizations and creatures were inhabiting this planet, that we don't even know about, back then, then so be it.

Worst case scenario is if it gets loose and starts to run amok in Siberia, they can send it to the Wuhan Virology Institute for safekeeping.

Now hit the fuckin music 

p.s. - this was good

p.p.s. - in all seriousness though, archaeologists recently uncovered DNA from the permafrost that has flipped what science previously thought about the history of civilization, the climate in the arctic, and creatures that inhabited the Earth eons ago, all on its head. And its really cool.

The Guardian - Two-million-year-old DNA from northern Greenland has revealed that the region was once home to mastodons, lemmings and geese, offering unprecedented insights into how climate change can shape ecosystems.

The breakthrough in ancient DNA analysis pushes back the DNA record by 1m years to a time when the Arctic region was 11-19C warmer than the present day. The analysis reveals that the northern peninsula of Greenland, now a polar desert, once featured boreal forests of poplar and birch trees teeming with wildlife. The work offers clues to how species might adapt, or be genetically engineered, to survive the threat of rapid global heating.

Prof Eske Willerslev of the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen, said: “A new chapter spanning 1m extra years of history has finally been opened and for the first time we can look directly at the DNA of a past ecosystem that far back in time.”

The fragments are 1m years older than the previous record for DNA sampled from a Siberian mammoth bone. “DNA can degrade quickly but we’ve shown that under the right circumstances, we can now go back further in time than anyone could have dared imagine,” said Willerslev.

The full article is great and worth the read. Once again it proves that the only thing we know for sure, is that we don't know shit.