AFTER spending 120,000 years buried 3 kilometres deep in the Greenland ice sheet, a tiny bacterium has been coaxed back to life. And it may resemble bugs you would expect to find in ice on other planets.
At its smallest, the rod-shaped bug is 0.5 by 0.3 micrometres – about 50 times smaller than the common microbe, Escherichia coli.
“What’s unique is that it’s so small, and seems to survive on so few nutrients,” says of Pennsylvania State University, whose team described the new species, dubbed Herminiimonas glaciei (International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology,
