New human-like species discovered

Re:New human-like species discovered by colordrops on Thursday September 10, 2015 @02:58PM (#10199873)

Isn't half-life dependent on temperature? Perhaps 521 is at higher temps. Also, half-life does not imply full destruction. By definition, it's destruction of half of the molecules. With enough copies, and a low temperature, it could last much longer than 521 years.

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Re:New human-like species discovered by jessriedel on Thursday September 10, 2015 @09:50PM (#10201574)

I believe it's the half-life for each bond. But 10^22 is plenty high enough that essentially all bond are broken, and certainly not enough left to reconstruct the genome. (You need unbroken sections of certain minimal lengths to statistically reconstruct what was there before.)

I think you're right that it's a temperature thing.

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