The 1918 flu virus, that caused the Spanish Flu Pandemic, also known as the Great Influenza Pandemic, has been recently resurrected by scientists in an effort to understand how the virus works, and to potentially prevent a similar outbreak.

It was the culmination of work that began a decade ago and involved fishing tiny fragments of the 1918 virus from snippets of lung tissue from two soldiers and an Alaskan woman who died in the 1918 pandemic. The soldiers' tissue had been saved in an Army pathology warehouse, and the woman had been buried in permanently frozen ground.

(via New York Times)