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Sabrina Zaidi

A cartoon drawing of a frozen zombie head encased in a cube of ice. The ice is melting and forms a puddle of water on the ground.

Awakening Ancient Viruses with Climate Change

We hear about zombies all the time in movies, books, and TV shows. They often start with a corpse coming back to life and passing a virus onto others, who then get infected and pass it onto more people— and suddenly you’ve got a zombie apocalypse on your hands. But what happens when the virus itself is a zombie, resurrected from its thousand-year underground slumber? While they might not be the bringers of the apocalypse, the release of ancient viruses that were previously frozen underground is a new and unprecedented consequence of climate change that has researchers wondering if they might cause issues for us in the future.

a disproportionately large nuclear fusion tube containing spherical fuel is shown being hit with lasers, powering a futuristic city.

Powering a Brighter Future with Fusion Ignition

On December 13, 2022, the world of clean energy changed forever with a groundbreaking announcement from the US Department of Energy. Fusion ignition had been achieved for the first time in history on December 5, 2022. Scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) at the US National Ignition Facility successfully achieved one of the largest scientific milestones of the 21st century by producing an excess of energy – even more than they put in.

An image of a jellyfish and a clam in the centre. On the left side is an image of a naked mole rat and on the right side, a chromosome with dark regions on the ends representing telomeres and DNA unwinding from one end

You Only Live (Forever) Once: The Science of Immortality and Life Extension

Immortality has always been one of those topics in science fiction that seemed a little too fantastical to ever be true. Maybe it’s not as full of paradoxes as time travel, or riddled with hypothetical questions like extra-terrestrials, but the concept of eternal life has long been seemingly rooted in our primal fear of death. Ever since humans could write, we’ve been fascinated with the preservation of life; from the ancient myths of the Fountain of Youth to the worship of everlasting deities, this fascination has truly stood the tests of time. Now that we finally have the knowledge and technology to potentially make immortality a reality, researchers are looking for ways to bring it out of science fiction and into the real world.

A thylacine walks out from the "History of Extinct Animals" book towards the modern world. The path the thylacine is walking on is lined with science-related objects, such as test tubes, mechanical gears, and magnets.

Science Fiction Becomes Fact: Bringing the Thylacine Back from Extinction

When I first watched Jurassic Park as a kid, I wasn’t at all worried about dinosaurs becoming a problem in the future. It was just science fiction after all, surely we can’t bring an extinct animal back to life! As time passed, the movie started becoming more of a cautionary tale and less fictional as the progress of scientific advancements continued to accelerate. In a world with climbing extinction rates yet remarkable technological innovations, it seems that the resurrection of extinct species is the solution to the extinction problem, but is it really a solution free of consequences?