Perpetual plankton

The three white-furred puppies in an undisclosed animal preserve enclosed by a 10-foot fence and perimeter security are not ordinary wolves.

Dallas, Texas company Colossal Biosciences (CB) claims the pups are North American dire wolves, a species that had been extinct for more than 12,500 years, CBS News reports.

CB CEO Ben Lamm said that they were able to “deextinct” the species by recreating the genome of the dire wolves based on DNA extracted from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull of its fossils found in the La Brea tar pits in the Los Angeles area, according to CBS News.

Using the gene editing technology CRISPR, the CB scientists then genetically modified cells from a living gray wolf according to the dire wolf genome to create embryos that were implanted in a domestic dog. The surrogate dog bore two male dire wolves in October, while a female was born in January.

Meanwhile, researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde in Rostock, Germany were able to observe the diatom species Skeletonema marinoi moving under a microscope, an extraordinary accomplishment.

The algae specimen was extracted in 2021 from sediment cores taken from a spot nearly 800 feet deep in the Eastern Gotland Deep, located between the Swedish island of Gotland and the Latvian west coast, according to ABC News, citing the institute’s experiment published in The ISME Journal.

It was dormant for over 7,000 years beneath the seafloor where there is no light or oxygen, but the researchers revived the algae until it regained full biological activity, reports ABC News.

Sarah Bolius, phytoplankton expert at the institute and lead author of the study, said the researchers performed “resurrection ecology,” putting the algae samples under favorable nutrient and light conditions until it was revived.

Despite remaining dormant for several thousand years, the phytoplankton specimens did not lose any of their “fitness” or biological performance ability, Bolius said, according to ABC News.