It’s not quite freezing someone and then waking them up thousands of years into the future, but it’s getting there. Scientists in Japan have successfully cloned a mouse that has lain frozen for 16 years. It raises the possibility of cloning other animals who’ve been frozen for hundreds or thousands of years – resurrecting extinct mammals.

The authors of the study are doubtful, however. They point out that it would be impractical to resurrect a mammoth, for instance, because there are no live mammoth cells available, and the ‘genomic material’ in something frozen for that long is ‘inevitably degraded’. Damn. I was looking forward to a pet pygmy mammoth.

(via ABC News)

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