I am Flor Lichten, and you're listening to Science Friday.

New extremophile alert, meet the fire amoeba.

This single-celled goo ball was found in a steamy stream in Lassen Volcanic National Park

in California's Cascade Mountains.

And the amoeba was still growing

and oozing at about 145 degrees Fahrenheit. That's like the temperature you shoot for when you cook

a steak to medium. And it is the new survival record for a eukaryotic cell. Here to tell us more is one of the researchers who

identified the microbe. Angela Oliveiro is a microbiologist at Syracuse University. Angela, welcome to

Science Friday. Hi, Flora. Thanks so much for having me on today. Give me the origin story on the

fire amoeba. Where did you find it? Sure. We went sampling at Lassen Volcanic National Park,

and on our way to Boiling Springs Lake, which is one of Lasson's sort of claims to fame,

there's this little tributary coming off of a stream, and we stopped to sample it because it was kind of like the first

hot geothermal feature that was on our hike so we were really excited even though to anyone else's

eye it was quite boring to what else we saw that day right but it was of interest to us because it was

pH neutral and we just suspected that different types of organisms would live there relative to

everything else we were sampling, which was going to be super acidic. But honestly, it's,

it's the most unremarkable feature that you'd see in lesson, like probably people hike by

every single day, including microbiologists and don't really stop here usually, right?

Because relative to everything else, it's just kind of a boring little stream.

And what do you find?

So we actually didn't find anything for a while.

We go back to our lab at Syracuse, and I should say the we is myself and

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