Like a virus, this new organism ‘Sukunaarchaeum mirabile’ outsources some functions to its host, but can still create its own ribosomes and RNA. Its genome is also surprisingly small, and is roughly half the size (238,000 base pairs) of the next-smallest archaeal genome. However, life is complicated, and this controversial categorization of “life” and “not life” can have gray areas in which organisms appear to defy the expectations of both camps. Viruses, as Live Science points out, can contain many hundreds of thousands more base pairs, and can even reach up into the millions. “The discovery of Sukunaarchaeum pushes the conventional boundaries of cellular life and highlights the vast unexplored biological novelty within microbial interactions,” the authors wrote.