![]() ![]() This year some varmint or bird has killed a few chickens. If it ain’t one pest destroying living things here at Damphewmore Acres, it’s another. “Okay, I’ll take it,” says the girl with a bright smile as she hands over the crisp $1 bill. The sympathetic farmer then points to a very small watermelon growing nearby and says “How about that one for $1?” “But, I’ve only got $1,” the girl replies, with a pouty lower lip. “That’ll cost you $7.50 for a really big watermelon,” says the farmer, pointing to a striped beauty. They’re complimentary.”Ī young girl visits a commercial truck garden one day and tells the farmer, “I want to buy a b-i-i-i-g watermelon.” “Oh, yeah, that happens all the time,” says the bartender, pointing to the bowl on the guy’s table. This time the cowboy is sure it is not his imagination, so he goes up to the bartender, and tells him what has happened. Concerned that his mind is playing tricks on him, he is now on guard, listening for any reoccurrences.Īfter a few minutes, a third small voice says, “Nice tight, bun-hugging Wranglers you’re wearing and your felt Stetson hat is the perfect shape and color for you.” ![]() “By looking at and analyzing these animals, we can maybe inform conservation biology, or maybe even develop efforts to protect other species, or at least learn what to do to protect them in these extreme conditions that we have now,” he told CNN.Again, the cowboy looks around, but can see nobody. “It means that some processes in evolution are deeply conserved.”Īnd, Schiffer added, there are other actionable insights which can be gleaned by studying these organisms. “To see that the same biochemical pathway is used in a species which is 200, 300 million years away, that’s really striking,” said Philipp Schiffer, research group leader of the Institute of Zoology at the University of Cologne and one of the scientists involved in the study. Both organisms produce a sugar called trehalose, possibly enabling them to endure freezing and dehydration. elegans - another organism often used in scientific studies - “a molecular toolkit” that could allow it to survive cryptobiosis. Eventually, genetic analysis conducted by scientists in Dresden and Cologne showed that these worms belonged to a novel species, which researchers named Panagrolaimus kolymaenis. One of the researchers, Anastasia Shatilovich, revived two of the worms at the institute by simply rehydrating them with water, before taking around 100 worms to labs in Germany for further analysis, transporting them in her pocket.Īfter thawing the worms, the scientists used radiocarbon analysis of the plant material in the sample to establish that the deposits had not been thawed since between 45,839 and 47,769 years ago.īut still, they didn’t know whether the worm was a known species. This a major finding,” he said, adding that other organisms previously revived from this state had survived for decades rather than millennia.įive years ago, scientists from the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science in Russia found two roundworm species in the Siberian permafrost. “One can halt life and then start it from the beginning. They remain in a state “between death and life,” in which their metabolic rates decrease to an undetectable level, Kurzchalia explained. Organisms in a cryptobiotic state can endure the complete absence of water or oxygen and withstand high temperatures, as well as freezing or extremely salty conditions. The roundworm, of a previously unknown species, survived 40 metres (131.2 feet) below the surface in the Siberian permafrost in a dormant state known as cryptobiosis, according to Teymuras Kurzchalia, professor emeritus at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden and one of the scientists involved in the research. Top science and technology headlines, all in one place.Scientists have revived a worm that was frozen 46,000 years ago - at a time when woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and giant elks still roamed the Earth. ![]()
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