A company called Colossal plans to pioneer the de-extinction business, taking species that have died within the past few thousand years and restoring them through the use of DNA editing and stem cells.
It's grabbed headlines recently by announcing some compelling targets: the thylacine, an extinct marsupial predator, and an icon of human carelessness, the dodo.
But there are some major practical hurdles as well, most of them the product of the distinct and extremely slow reproductive biology of the mammoth's closest living relatives, the elephants.
It will be difficult to ensure that we've identified all of the key genetic changes that make for a distinct species; editing in only a portion of them might produce unviable organisms.
But Colossal is forging ahead and cleared one of the many hurdles it faces: It created the first induced stem cells from elephants and will be placing a draft manuscript describing the process on a public repository on Wednesday.
That has proven effective in a variety of species but has a couple of drawbacks due to the fact that the four genes can potentially stick around, interfering with later development steps.
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We're basically some of the last megafauna. There's smaller prey that is an easier target for them with less risk to them personally. Predators generally avoid prey that can injure them. It sounds like the Indigenous people already had some experience around these creatures that was shared to the researchers and I am sure the researchers took great pains as to normalise their presence and not make them feel cornered or threatened. This species is about ten times older than us, being hyper aggressive and violent is a really bad trait for survival, generally. "Survival of the fittest" gets really misconstrewed.
Interesting read. Last fatal attack in Norway was in 1964, but they stay far away from human settlements. As you hike you see them, there's information boards telling you stay at least 100m away from them, though some tourists think it's Disney land and push that limit pretty far.
While diving under the ice in McMurdo Sound, some of the team came across giant Antarctic sea spiders that appeared to be mating. So, they gently collected the animals and transferred them to observation tanks to figure out how the heck these enigmatic creatures procreate.
You'd think it'd be the opposite? "The wolves who were most resistant to cancer were the ones who passed on their genetics" seems like a pretty easy thing to understand
The mention genetic changes, but didn’t mention any gene names. I would have been interested to see something like TP53 duplications but there’s no way enough time would have passed for that to occur. It’s not super clear whether the population changes reflect a bottleneck or specific, advantageous mutations to cancer resistance.
Who had "Razed By Wolves" for the end of humanity as we know it?
Kieth? No? Was it you, Cynthia? Ohright. You had "Tentacles From Beyond", I forgot. (You do know that Lovecraft was a hateful little shit, right?) — Oh! Camina? The Wolves are yours? Yes, and Logan's, too. That tracks.
This is important and good research, but I can't help but laugh desperately at how this is yet another piece of research that can be summarised as "biodiversity good".
One of the world’s smallest fish, measuring about the width of an adult human fingernail, can make a sound as loud as a gunshot, scientists have said.
The male Danionella cerebrum, a fish of about 12mm found in the streams of Myanmar, produces sounds that exceed 140 decibels, according to the study published in the PNAS journal, equal to an ambulance siren or jackhammer.
The most common mechanism in fishes to produce sound involved vibrations of their swim bladder – a gas-filled organ used to control buoyancy – driven by rhythmic contractions of specialised “drumming” muscles, the paper said.
The scientists at Charité University in Berlin have found the fish has a unique sound production system, involving a drumming cartilage, specialised rib and fatigue-resistant muscle.
To produce sound, a rib that lies next to the swim bladder is moved by a special muscle into a piece of cartilage.
The scientists have not established why the fish make such loud sounds but suggested it could help navigate murky waters or be an aggressive tactic used by males to warn off competition.
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This hits on a lot of things I've been thinking about lately, thank you for posting it. I would love more stories about successful species and the way they see the world.
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