Joel Kontinen
“Deep below the surface of the South Pacific Ocean, buried beneath 70 metres of seafloor sediment, there are microbes that may be about 75 million years old. These organisms are among the oldest known life forms on the planet, yet exactly how they manage to maintain their near-immortality has remained a mystery,” New Scientist tells us.
Now, New Scientist has found a formula to keep the microbes alive: “James Bradley, a geobiologist at the University of Southern California, and his colleagues think they have solved the puzzle: to stay alive, the microbes stay mostly dead.”
However, the formula proposed by New Scientist is off by a few million years.
Source:
Joel, Lucas. 2018. 75-million-year old ocean microbes live forever on almost zero energy. New Scientist (11 October).
Posts
