Tag : Zombie

Moscow: French scientists have revived a 48,500-year-old zombie virus buried under a frozen lake in Russia until now! According to New York Post, French scientists have sparked fears of yet another pandemic after reviving the "zombie virus". New York Post is a daily tabloid newspaper published in New York City. New York Post has quoted a viral study which is yet to be peer-reviewed. "The situation would be much more disastrous in the case of plant, animal, or human diseases caused by the revival of an ancient unknown virus," reads the "viral" study. According to the preliminary report, global warming is irrevocably thawing enormous swathes of permafrost -- permanently frozen ground that covers one-quarter of the Northern Hemisphere. This has had the unsettling effect of "releasing organic materials frozen for up to a million years" - possibly deadly germs included. "Part of this organic matter also consists of revived cellular microbes (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes) as well as viruses that remained dormant since prehistorical times," the researchers write. According to the New York Post, scientists have, perhaps strangely, revived some of these so-called "zombie viruses" from the Siberian permafrost in order to investigate the awakening critters. The oldest, Pandoravirus yedoma, was 48,500 years old, a record age for a frozen virus returning to a form where it may infect other creatures. This breaks the previous record of a 30,000-year-old virus identified in Siberia by the same scientists in 2013. The new strain is one of 13 viruses described in the study, each with its own genome, according to Science Alert. While the Pandoravirus was discovered at the bottom of a lake in Yukechi Alas, Yakutia, Russia, others have been ...