One of the best things about science is that, in addition to discovering entirely new entities, there's always this tendency to re-discover very small and old things and find shiny new implications to make them sound devastatingly exciting all over again. Take bacteria, for example. Who likes bacteria? Pretty much no one. At best it's kind of slimy, and at worst you have chlamydia and meningitis at the same time. (And what are delicious dairy products, if not the exception that proves the rule?) But take that bacteria, throw it on the ice for a cool eight-million years, then bring it back to life like some kind of unicellular necromancer, and you've got yourself a pretty interesting situation.

The bacterium in question was extracted by Kay Bidle and a team of colleagues from Rutgers University, from ice some ten feet or so below the surface of an insanely ancient glacier between the Beacon and Mullins valleys in Antarctica. Once they had the ice, all chock full of bacteria and paleolithic animal DNA, they tried to make something spark back at the lab. I want to call their success surprising, but you never can tell with things kept frozen under ice. (Just ask one of those wily frozen wood frog motherfuckers.)

That there's a significantly greater variation of bacteria in more recent ice samples shouldn't really be that surprising to anyone (theoretically speaking, anyway), but the potential for even the smallest bits of living things to just wake up after millions and millions of years of cryogenic sleep is quite enthralling. Also, kind of scary, when one considers the implications of this in conjunction with the state of our environment at the moment. We are reassured, however, that -- though it may be impossible to keep Jurassic Park ideas out of anyone's head -- at least we won't (read: shouldn't) have to worry about crazy moon diseases from the past, and even if we did, the diseases are allegedly all pretty senile and retarded at this point anyway.

Superb! I'm convinced. Speaking of convinced, however, the article can't resist throwing in a sobering dose of reality at the end, saying that these ancient bacteria might not even really be ancient.

Oh please, talk about a prehistoric buzzkill. I'm holding out hope on this one, that scientific precision has prevailed against poor hygiene, and that the ancient bacterium doesn't turn out to just be halitosis. Perhaps it is selfish of me, yes, but I have a dream that where there are ancient reanimated bacteria, awesome ancient reanimated dinosaurs can't be far behind. Come on, intrepid researchers, don't let me down!