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The first-of-its-kind discovery, described as "a dream of many fiction writers," was a huge leap forward in understanding how specimens -- perhaps even humans -- can be preserved for generations. The bdelloid rotifer is awake – and we're going to need to buy some more birthday candles. For the past 24,000 years, the multicellular microorganism had been snoozing in Siberian permafrost, having become frozen in the Arctic ice right around the same time in history that humans first ventured into North America during the Upper Paleolithic era, otherwise known as the Late Stone Age. A bdelloid rotifer is a freshwater...

The tiny animals - otherwise known as water bears - are famous for surviving in the vacuum of space, among other impossibly hostile environments. But they just got even weirder: According to research published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tardigrades get a massive chunk of their DNA from other organisms. "Foreign" DNA is not a foreign concept to scientists. Through a process called horizontal gene transfer, any organism can theoretically swap genes with another. It happens among bacteria all the time, which is how antibiotic resistance spreads so quickly. But it's less common in more...