In the deadliest place on Earth, where radiation can kill you in minutes, scientists

found something growing on the walls, and it wasn't dying, it was thriving.

I'm Darren Marler, and this is Weird Dark News.

There are places on this planet where life simply isn't supposed to exist.

Places so hostile, so fundamentally incompatible with biology, that even bacteria struggle

to survive. And yet, as we've learned,

time and again, life is a peculiar habit of showing up precisely where we least expect it,

and doing things that make scientists scratch their heads and question everything they thought

they knew. All right, let's set the scene here, because context matters.

On April 26, 1986, a routine safety test at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant's reactor

4 went catastrophically wrong.

Now, catastrophically wrong might be the understatement of the century.

The resulting explosions sent a fireball of radioactive

material into the atmosphere and created what remains the worst nuclear disaster in human history.

The Soviet authorities eventually established a 19-mile exclusion zone around the site,

a dead zone covering 1,600 square miles where radiation levels were

so high that simply existing there was a death sentence. And for a while, that's exactly

what it looked like. A dead zone. No humans, no animals, just silence and the slow decay of an

abandoned city.

But then something weird started happening.

Fast forward to 1991, just five years after the disaster, and a team of Ukrainian scientists,

led by microbiologist Nelly Jadnova, did something most people would consider certifiably

...