All it took was a single sample of frozen Siberian soil for an international collaboration of researchers to discover, and revive, a new type of "giant virus" — a virus whose unusually large size means scientists can spot it through a light microscope.
Indeed, despite being frozen for over 30,000 years, Pithovirus sibericum still packs a punch: a simple thawing procedure allowed it to infect a throng of unsuspecting single-cell organisms for the first time in thousands of years. And given that climate change is already causing the ground to thaw in regions such as the Arctic and parts of Alaska, scientists fear that this lab experiment could eventually take to the field, leading to the spontaneous revival of ancient and unknown...
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