
Cool
All they need now is a sabre-toothed tiger and a sloth!
The long-time staple of sci-fi films to recreate prehistoric colossi could soon become a reality – with the woolly mammoth now a step closer to once again walking the earth. George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard University, has inserted DNA from the frozen remains of a woolly mammoth into cells taken from a live …
Really unfunny.
Is it true that some down there enjoy licking the skins of cane toads or drying then eating or smoking the skin for a psychotropic effect?
I am sad that a nearby public garden has only toads, never frogs. The water is clean enough for frogs to live, but between children 'collecting' and carp, I have never seem a frog there.
"Is it true that some down there enjoy licking the skins of cane toads or drying then eating or smoking the skin for a psychotropic effect?"
Only if you narrow down the right substance and purify it. Generally, licking enough of it off the back of the toad to get you high will get enough toxins to stop your heart too. In other words, you're just gonna die.
Probably for the best, if you think licking cane toads is a good idea, you're probably not well suited for this society. Might be ok for a politician though.
Excellent point. I think one of the problems faced in this situation, is that it's unprecedented. Not even in a work of fiction has anyone speculated about this kind of science, and the mild peril that may result. However, as luck would have it, I've actually written a novel that deals with this subject at length. It's about about a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advanced cloning techniques. I call it "Billy and the Cloneasaurus."
Maybe mammoths were fierce man-eaters, and prehistory humans spent 50,000 years running away, being extremely frightened, and being mammoth lunch. After a narrow victory where humans barely survived, they finally managed to exterminate the ferocious beasts.
In the far future... "Hey! I found a test tube marked 'Jihadist'. Let's reanimate them, whatever they are."
I think mammoths are kind of safe -- compared to (for example) cane toads, it would be trivially easy to hunt them down and cull them if required. Much like the sequoias imported and planted in the UK -- if they did prove to be dangerous weeds, we could find them all (they can't hide) and cut them down, and within one sequoia generation, there would be no more sequioas in the UK.
Better still, they suddenly grow tusks, long shaggy coats, and an extra elephantid layer of subcutaneous fat from lack of care in handling the genetic materials.
Unable to contain their hunger, they lumber to a fast-food shop.
A crowd of human hippotami, arse cracks on display, watch them eat, exclaiming 'Ooh, that is just so gross'.
As the mammoth-experimenters lumber out, they are trailed by hippos ...
Scientists too smart for their own good that got killed by their genetic experiments.
Oh yes, we've never seen that trope before.
Terribly dangerous research, this, splicing some genes into a genome and culturing some cells. Best keep the petri dish under lock and key.
Personally, I'm going to remain a bit more concerned about the wild-eyed folks at Monsanto et alia whacking random genes into commercial plant seed and the like, with essentially no idea what the consequences of widespread distribution might be.
Given that elephants consume vast quantities of leaves and tall grasses - what will they eat in the Arctic? My recollection is that the tundra is short on trees - or indeed much above lichens and mosses. Further south there are forests - but conifers don't seem to be the same accessible and digestible vegetation that one equates with elephant food.
Ah - for my next trick sorry, I mean funding application I'm going to splice (or do I mean graft) some prehistoric tundra dna and we'll have 20 foot high lichens for the little buggers to hide in, and that MUST do something for rapid carbon sequesteration... <MUMMY I LEARNDED A NEW WORD> <GLOBAL WARMING> <HIC> <CLIMATE CHANGE>
Can I have my funding grant now, please, mummy? Want a new moss to talk to...
NURSE! My pills...
That's actually been a bit of a mystery until fairly recently. The short answer is a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't grow there today. The arctic had a different balance of plants when wooly mammoths were alive. They ate mostly plants called forbs or phorbs to which things like milkweed, sunflowers, and lots of small flowering plants belong. In other environments, they and the other species of mammoth that have been dug up ate sedges and similar in much the same way modern elephants do.
To the point of combating climate change: I suppose if we rework the entire arctic to allow mammoths and other large herbivores from the Pleistocene to eat, we might also change the climate. Mammoths will certainly not do much on their own. They will be doing good to eat at all in cooler climes.
Sources:CBCNews and the San Jose Mammoth page.
" mammoths may have kept the tundra colder."
I can find references to people citing this study but not the study, how can Mammoths help to keep the tundra colder? I know they would probably have produced a lot of methane a greenhouse gas that would have meant whatever else they did would have to offset it's effects; did they use it as a refrigerant, bloody clever if they did.
Have you not considered the superb insulating properties of several feet of deep frozen fluffy mammoth s**t??
So, now you see the sense of adding a few cane toad genes - Make 'em cold blooded, so the mammoth s**t hasn't got so far to cool down.
Oh I just LOVE real science!
Reviving the mammoth is more than thirty years old as an idea.
I don't think this research comes much closer than announcements from teams with collaboration between Russia and Japan or Korea in past years.
Maybe they can emplace the genes for hair growth and sub-cutaneous fat and switch them on, but it is on the same level as making a fruit-fly grow an eye where a leg should be, or making other insects grow antennae instead of legs (both already done), for the time being.
As many point out, WTF is human science doing with such projects when the locust-like population growth of our species and its lack of regard for so many others keeps putting more at risk of extinction?
Gene splicing has been used for various experiments to produce variants with borrowed characteristics.
A common one is to use the glow-in-the dark genes from a jellyfish to show that a genetic modification has worked in a mouse or similar animal.
Web silk is impossible to farm by using large numbers of spiders. The relevant genes have been spliced into goats to produce web silk from their milk in a more manageable process.
The only thing keeping people from producing web silk from large quantities of spiders is that it's cost prohibitive. Can you imagine trying to staff a spider farm with cheap, migrant workers?
Recruiter: "So, do you have farming experience?"
Applicant: "Yes."
Recruiter: "Any experience with textiles?"
Applicant: "Yes."
Recruiter: "Great! You start immediately! Any questions?"
Applicant: "Yes. What animals are here?"
Recruiter: "Well, um... Okay, look, I assure you it's perfectly safe. You have nothing to worry about. But... Well... We farm spiders here."
Applicant: "... ... AAAGGHHHH!"
(Door slams)
Recruiter: "I need a new job."
Antipodean Archeologist: "Wait ... these are Mammoth eggs! You made Mammoths?"
Smug Chinese Scientist: "Relax! We only made female Mammoths!"
Rotund Scots Entrepreneur: "I really cannae see ..."
Sounds of splintering wood, breaking glass and screaming people
Antipodean Archeologist: "What was that?"
Chain-Smoking Older Nerd-Type: "The fences are down!"
Enter Blithering Mathematician: "I totally predicted this. We should run. This way ... Aaaargh!"
Rotund Scots Entrepreneur: "Oh nae, a Mammoth has trodden on Dr Boring.
Antipodean Archeologist: "Good!"
And so forth.
Attention Steven Spielberg: Gissajob!
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This article has many "holes". Tundra cooler? Global warming (the CO2 myth, another fundraiser). Reviving mammoths? You don't get mammoths by changing a few genes in an elephants' DNA. Looks to me like someone needs attention to gets his funding flowing. They should create a price for that. idem dito for the journalist who never check their sources.