Slashdot Mirror
Most of Woolly Mammoth Genome Reconstructed
geekmansworld writes "From the Washington Post, 'An international team of scientists has reconstructed more than three-quarters of the genome of the woolly mammoth using DNA extracted from balls of hair, the first time this has been accomplished for an extinct species.' Who wants a pet mammoth?"
I for one welcome the new hirsute elephantine overlords
Given that they have yet to work out how many chromosomes the woolly mammoth had, or which of the DNA features are genuine mutations, and which are artefacts caused by damage since the death of the creatures from whom DNA was extracted, there's a fair distance to go yet.
Still, I don't doubt this is a seriously fun project to be working on. I'd love to get involved.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
the numbers of woolly mammoths has tripled in the past six months...
As a kid I always thought that Wooly Mammoths died out aroud the same time as the dinosaurs but I heard a while back that they might have been around until a couple of thousand years ago. I now know that man hunted them to the dinosaur date is wrong but when did the last one shed it's mortal coil?
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
And I thought cats were disgusting...
Blank until
with those from the Tasmanian Devil ala Jurassic Park. What could possibly go wrong?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
It could be the solution of how how to maintain legacy systems in generations to come. They just need to start mapping the genes of a COBOL programmer.
In Soviet Russia, mammoth mount YOU!
aka "Fatal Attraction 2".
Not to mention, didn't we also have this story about how the proteins affect the transcription too, and the same piece of DNA can be transcribed in a dozen different ways or not at all, depending on how those proteins regulate it? It seems to me like in that case it's like saying they decoded half of it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You want us all to read a book/anthology just to get one joke? /Shakes head/ Only on slashdot...
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/science/20mammoth.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
right NOW, we can do this
apparently it would be tedious, but a number of technical hurdles have been overcome lately to the point where this is really conceivable to do, and the talk about doing it isnot theoretical, but practical
1. most recent modern genome decoders don't care that the dna is shredded into pieces
2. encapsulated in keratin (hair), the dna is not so tainted by bacterial dna like it is in bone
3. a new technique allows modifying modern elephant dna 50,000 genomic sites at a time, rather than one by one, so the proper egg can be arrived at after a few generations of reconstruction, implanted in a female elephant, and voila
this can be done, right NOW!
amazing
even more freaky: we can do the same, right now, with neanderthal!
using chimpanzee as a starting point for ethical considerations, we can also, right NOW, bring a neanderthal back to life
that's pretty freaky. these guys wouldn't be dumb. someone would have to explain to the guy that he is not the last of his species, he's an artifically reconstructed clone of a guy who died 50,000 years ago. no one of his kind exists anymore
but we revived a wooly old friend of yours too. here's a spear, happy hunting
just don't eat the dodo
or the quagga
or the irish elk
or the auroch
or the sabretooth though
really really freaky and amazing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
My g/f was looking over my shoulder and proclaimed she already had a pet wooly mammoth and looked at me :(
Do they taste good??
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Crocodilians do not come from dinosaurs, although they are related, i.e. their earliest common ancestor was neither a dinosaur nor a crocodilian. On the other hand, the earliest common ancestor of birds was a dinosaur.
Also, mammals existed at least 125Mya:
The oldest known marsupial is Sinodelphys, found in 125M-year old early Cretaceous shale in China's northeastern Liaoning Province. The fossil is nearly complete and includes tufts of fur and imprints of soft tissues.
How about a furby?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
I don't think you understand. The internet and slashdot was an elaborate ploy by Nivens to get more fans. He planted the ideas for the internet a long time ago and nurtured it until the web was born. He then planted the idea to create a forum for nerds. Once this was done he waited for critical mass and posted this line. Now people like me who stopped reading fiction some time ago, will see this name and investigate on the very same internet! Its rather brilliant. The only thing is that if we comply and read, then he will no longer have a use for the internet and will likely have it taken down (his purpose being completed). To prevent the destruction of this invaluable tool, I will boycott reading any further.
and with my first paranoid rant done, I am ready to start my day!
When all else fails, try.
Do we really want to do this to a sentient and intelligent species?
For a start, the Neanderthal will be a circus freak for all his life. Whatever his other achievements or shortcomings would be, he'll still be that reconstructed Neanderthal. I doubt that he could have a normal job or relationship or interact normally with new people, without getting back to that aspect that he's the only Neanderthal in the world. Even assuming that all people he'll meet are nice and tactful, it's still that curiosity aspect. It sounds like a recipe for getting depressed later.
But the more realistic aspect is that most people just aren't that nice. There are plenty of people for which it's nearly impossible to say "black" without an "N", if you know what I mean, and for whom it's a human rights issue if you even ask them to be nice. Can you imagine what these guys would be like, to a different _species_.
I mean, whatever job he'll ever get, and for whatever personal skills or achievements, there'll _always_ be some idiot trying to make one of the following points:
- he only got it because he's a Neanderthal, or
- Earth for humans, you freaks don't belong here, or
- here's a long list of bullshit and fallacies as to why your kind is biologically too stupid for this job, and we don't want your kind around,
etc.
Can you imagine a Neanderthal going through high-school without a trauma, for that matter? High school "society" nowadays is based on _extreme_ conformism. (Even if, ironically, it usually means conforming to the image of being a non-conformist rebel.) To belong there, you must look like everyone else, listen to the same music as everyone else, say the same ideas and memes as everyone else, etc. Probably half the RIAA labels' income comes from teenagers who just have to buy the same albums as everyone else in their peer group, for example. And being different in any way, is a recipe for being at best ostracized and at worst bullied constantly. How do you think they'll behave towards our hypothetical reconstructed Neanderthal, which looks different from the rest, speaks very differently too (if recent research about their larynx and hearing system are right), maybe even has different aptitudes (Neanderthals never seem to have invented or used or made missile weapons, so maybe this guy will just not be wired to have any skill in any ball game), and possibly have the brain wired differently enough to think differently?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
>Well the placental mammals, like us and almost every other mammal, did not evolve until after the Asteroid event.
Wrong. There were plenty of mammals in the Mesozoic. And according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology "Eutherians first became common in central Asia during the Upper Cretaceous." Eutherians being the technically correct name for placental mammals.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mammal/eutheria/eutheriafr.html
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Actually, apparently there is exactly 0% Neanderthal in us, if you look at the DNA. You can see the differences between Neanderthals and the common ancestor (since that's what made them Neanderthals), and you can see the differences between humans and the common ancestor (since that's what makes us humans.) The two sets just don't overlap. All the genes that made Neanderthals be Neanderthals are not present in us.
The easiest to look at is the mitochondrial DNA, since it's pretty small, and it's been mapped to death for both species. We just don't have any humans which show the unique Neanderthal mutations there. So at least there was no _female_ neanderthal in anyone's ancestry.
Now I'd be surprised if they didn't at least try to have sex with each other, given that in some places they lived in the same cave for tens of thousands of years. I mean, so it was short and stout women with sloped foreheads. Some people would still try to screw one, if one was available. And viceversa.
The more probable explanation is that, like any other combination of different species, the offspring was either non-viable (if the species are not that related) or sterile (if they're closely related.) E.g., see mules, or either combination of lion and tiger.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.