For the term of their natural, windowless, lives
January 18th 2011 05:02
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Vyoos news
Living to be 34,000 years old would have some advantages (you'd have a lot of chances at the lottery), but there are some serious drawbacks too.
For a start, you would have to be a bacterium, which means that you would be limited, even if you did win the lottery, in what you could buy and enjoy.
Secondly, it's a long time to have a lousy view.
The 34,000-year-olds are a family of microbes were found by a research team digging in salt crystals at the bottom of Death Valley in California. The ancients were found living inside tiny, fluid-filled chambers within the crystals.
Brian Schubert, who made the discovery, described the find as a "very big surprise".
"They're alive," he said, "but they're not using any energy to swim around, they're not reproducing, they're not doing anything at all except maintaining themselves."
Long-term maintenance, but not much to look at and even less to do.
The story of the microbes has just been published in GSA Today, the publication of the Geological Society of America.
story: dailymail.co.uk; image: agry.purdue.edu
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