Ancient Yeast Used To Brew Modern Beer 106
Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Yeast trapped inside a 45 million year old weevil, trapped inside amber has been extracted, activated, and used to brew beer. According to the report, the beer has 'a weird spiciness at the finish.' The brewer, Raul Cano, a scientist at the California Polytechnic State University, attributes this to the yeast's unusual metabolism. 'The ancient yeast is restricted to a narrow band of carbohydrates, unlike more modern yeasts, which can consume just about any kind of sugar,' said Cano. Cano brews barrels of Pale Ale and German Wheat Beer under the Fossil Fuels Brewing Co. label."
Re:Ressurrecting a 45-million-year-old life form (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ressurrecting a 45-million-year-old life form (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering how disruptive it can be to introduce species from other geographic regions, I can't imagine that bringing back specimens from millenia ago is going to be very prudent.
I'm not too worried.
The rest of the biosphere has had megayears of the Red Queen's Race to get better at offense and defense - especially with chemical warfare and intelligence. A resurrected fossil - even with resurrections of its ecological support network to help out - is still likely to be at a severe disadvantage. The problem IMHO is more likely to be able to keep it alive than to keep it from getting out of hand.
Re:Ressurrecting a 45-million-year-old life form (Score:1, Insightful)
The rest of the biosphere has had megayears of the Red Queen's Race to get better at offense and defense - especially with chemical warfare and intelligence.
Evolutionary progress isn't exactly linear. Maintaining a defense against a no-longer-existent threat is not really advantageous. Megayears of evolution might have eliminated current species' defenses against this yeast while developing defenses against things which are still present. That's what evolution is! It's about adapting to the environment, not about picking up offenses or defenses or powerups or whatever.
Consider for example how scientists are worried that nobody is immune to smallpox anymore. Sure it "doesn't exist" anymore, except for a few lab samples, but if someone stole one of those to use it as a weapon...
Anyway, if this yeast is toxic, it may be toxic in a manner which nothing alive now can defend against. Or it may be harmless, or it might just cause a mild rash, or it might be fatal to the flying squirrel and nothing else, who knows? There is no reason, however, to believe that "evolution" makes us safe.