As more and more species near extinction, scientists have been collecting samples from animals, plants and other creatures and storing them in biorepositories across the globe (SN: 5/8/19). But climate change, environmental disasters and wars threaten these modern Noah’s arks (SN: 2/28/22). Now, a team of researchers is brainstorming an out-of-this-world solution: building one of these vaults on the moon.
A biorepository in a permanently shadowed region at the moon’s south pole could be far more stable than those on Earth. Those areas usually remain around –196° Celsius, the minimum temperature required to store most animal cells long-term, research scientist Mary Hagedorn and colleagues report July 31 in BioScience.
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