'his original aim was to "find ancient microscopic creatures that might have some kind of medical value"'

You neglected to mention that this is of medicinal value, beer is renowned for it's stress relieving qualities.

I wash at a pale-e-ant... pale-e-oont... ancient hishtory lesshon.

>hic<

I love you. You're ma besht friend.

Repeat after me 'The Eocene is not the Jurassic'. It can't be a dino-yeast you thundering idiot since apart from birds, dinosaurs had been extinct for 20 million years. This is a 45 million year old yeast. You're a 100 million years out. The nearest it came to a flipping dino was a thrush. Maybe's that's what you got a bad case of in the brain.

I know you guys like a bit of artistic license in your reporting but this is taking it a bit far.

I hope I get at least an honourable mention in FOTW.

Cheers

45 million isn't old enough to even be the Cretaceous.

Try Cenozoic.

... but your 45GYO beer will taste absolutely not like this concoction brewed up. The grains used now weren't around until quite a while after humans started to select them from wild varieties, oh about 1/3000 times as long ago [so let's say 15.000BC].

Isn't he the same Dr. Cano who once tried to revive fossilized bacteria? I recall Dave Barry wrote a column about it.

Anyway, is he doing something involving prehistorical pretzels and peanuts? Give this man a huge grant!

"Rather than attacking the infection full-on, they could simply put the offending organism to sleep"

45 million years out to do it ;-)

Beer and medicine! best out come for any scientific endeavour! If only once the LHC had cracked open we had found some supper coolant alcohol! mm icy.

Paris, because she prefers to pop inside and neck down a warm one.

What's a Lebanese weevil doing in Burmese amber? Weevils can't fly. There's something not quite right with this story.

Ahhh beer. The cause of and answer to all of life's problems.

African or European?

Better to worry about about resurrecting fungi, bacteria etc from the distant past. Maybe WE are only here because THEY died out. One thing is for certain, they once were viable in the wild unlike black holes on earth. I'll skip the beer.

http://www.ibabuzz.com/beer/2008/08/06/sampling-a-beer-made-with-45-million-year-old-yeast-fossil-fuels-brewing/

Funny yeast extraction was reported back in 1995 i.e.

RJ Cano, MK Borucki, 'Revival and identification of bacterial spores in 25- to 40-million-year-old Dominican amber', Science 19 May 1995:Vol. 268. no. 5213, pp. 1060 - 1064 DOI: 10.1126/science.7538699

Its only the beer angle that made the news with this new extraction.

BTW You can only get the beer in Northern California according to the company web site.

http://fossilfuelsbrewingco.com/

WTF? They're patenting a 45 million year old yeast strain they found?? God help us all against the USPTO.