Was an ancient bacterium awakened by an industrial accident?
What lies beneath a Louisiana lake
New species are generally found rather than awakened. And they are typically discovered in remote places like rainforests or Antarctic plateaus. But not so a species of bacterium described in a paper just published in Extremophiles. As Russell Vreeland and Heng-Lin Chui, the paper’s authors, point out, the bug is new to science. But it is not new to Earth. In fact the microbe may have been slumbering for millions of years before being awakened by an industrial disaster.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Roused from a salty slumber”
From the November 18th 2023 edition
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