How microbes live for centuries – by shutting down | Aeon Essays
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How a 500-year experiment to revive dormant microbes could reveal the secrets to cheating time
Suppose you wanted to preserve a room completely unchanged. Picture an Egyptian tomb, or perhaps a storage vault for fragile artefacts. Suppose that your maintenance budget is effectively zero. How should you arrange things? Is it better to seal up your chamber against every possible disturbance? Or perhaps you make a provision for cleaners to come in whenever resources permit. They might not be able to do much. They might knock things over. But still, perhaps they’re better than nothing – a fragile, fallible defence against the forces of entropy. It is said that if you want to survive,…
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