30,000-year-old giant virus 'comes back to life' (bbc.co.uk)

Okay this could be a new hollywood introduction to an end of the world scenario. Hopefully we will make it to the end of our days without a zombie outbreak or another end of the world scenario :D

Well this is a potential side-effect of global climate change/warming that I had never considered... And I don't know this for sure, but off the cuff, I'm betting neither have 7,999,999,000 or so of the 8 billion people on the planet.

And I'm not talking about the Godzilla-esque viruses, but the possibly dormant but not dead strains of smallpox, etc.

Great illustration though - we may not have eradicated any viruses on the planet - just on the surface. (Paraphrase the article.)

This reminds me of a very recent TV series

Sort of an aside, but Radiolab recently had an episode about the relatively new class of giant "as big as bacteria" viruses. This appears to be one of those. I found the episode fascinating.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/shrink/

The scientist they interview, Jean-Michel Claverie, has done a lot of work in the large DNA-virus world, along with Didier Raoult. One of his best papers IMO (http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/gb-2006-7-6-110) goes into some theories about viruses. Basically, these nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses (NCLDVs) look quite a lot like a nucelus in their infected amoeba targets. On some level, going back, who's to say that the nucleus wasn't just some big, DNA virus that stuck around? The parallel to the mitochondria/chloroplast theory is kind of neat to boot. Definitely worth a read.

Is there any reason to be worried about the ice caps harboring viruses that could potentially wipe us out?

Might be worth noting that story is from March 2014.

"The Dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum... shadow and flame."

Good post. Though it doesn't really make the distinction that these giant viruses are actually very different from normal viruses. They may have actually "reverse-evolved" from bacteria, and may not even be related to regular viruses.

For anyone who listens to podcasts, there is a great Radiolab about their discovery.

I love it when scientists assure us of our safety.

I think it's amazing because, well, what technology do we have that could "come back to life" in 30,000 years frozen?

Nature showing how diverse and robust some of its work is.

"It comes into the cell, multiplies and finally kills the cell. It is able to kill the amoeba - but it won't infect a human cell."

Haven't there been brain eating amoeba's?

http://www.webmd.com/brain/brain-eating-amoeba