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| Animal (228) | |
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These geodesic aquariums, inspired by Fuller's prototypes for sturdy lightweight structures, will be let loose in swirling ocean gyres,
The practice of biomimicry already taps into nature's ingenuity oe for example, the famous hexagonal skin of Norman Foster's Gherkin was inspired by the Venus Flower Basket sponge,
-which enables us to grow organisms that do not exist in nature by manipulating their DNA oe to create trees that produce a natural light-producing protein usually found in jellyfish.
and creepers that blocked their way. Over time, their perseverance paid off as their hand-drawn maps began to reveal long-forgotten parts of the massive Mayan city of Caracol.
where the leaders kept their stores of hummingbird and macaw feathers, the dominant currency. A year later
including a low-cost nutcracker for farmers in Morocco and a solar-powered incubator for guinea fowl in Burkina faso.
zero-energy system for keeping camel milk cool in soaring temperatures that commonly reach 45c (113 Fahrenheit).
A century ago, vast flocks of passenger pigeons covered the North american skies. Hundreds of millions, even billions, stretched across the horizon in every direction.
like a dragon going through the skies, Â says Harvard Medical school geneticist George Church. And then European settlers arrived.
the last known passenger pigeon, died in Cincinnati Zoo. But if Church has his way, this majestic sight could one day return to our skies.
he and other scientists are dreaming up ambitious plans to resurrect long-dead animals from pigeons to Tasmanian tigers and wooly mammoths.
 The same technologies could also prevent endangered species from going the way of the dodo oe or the passenger pigeon.
A key part of this grand ambition lies in the lines of test tubes frozen in liquid nitrogen in a Californian zoo.
In 1972, Oliver Ryder, a geneticist at the San diego Zoo, had the visionary idea of freezing skin samples from endangered animals in the hope they might help protect these species in the future.
Many captive animals suffer from genetic abnormalities and inbreeding, and Ryder imagined that his repository of animal cells could be used long after their donors died to help zoo veterinarians manage captive populations.
He never viewed his"Frozen Zoo  oe which now stores cells from 9 000 individual vertebrates belonging to more than 1, 000 different species oe as a way of producing new animals.
As far as he and other scientists knew,  only stem cells found in embryos had the ability to transform into the building blocks of  any part of the body,
whether a cell in the liver or the eye. Ryder's collection of skin cells were thought just that
it was implanted into the uterus of another animal, which carried the clone to birth.""Dolly is derived from a mammary gland cell
From dogs to cows, scientists rushed to clone a menagerie of animals using Wilmut's technique, known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT.
Many animals were born unhealthy and the cloning process was inefficient, with success rates of around 1%.Less charitable critics still call these efforts stunts,
"Producing the odd animal here and there, which may be sick, didn't seem a very sensible thing to do,
In 2007 Japanese scientists reported, first in mice and later in humans, that an adult cell could be reverted to an embryo-like stem cell.
Skin cells could be converted into sperm that could create an animal through in vitro fertilisation (IVF), or even transformed into whole animals.
Both feats have been accomplished in mice and they should be possible in other animals, scientists say.
As a first step, Ryder and a team of stem cell scientists have reprogrammed the skin cells from a northern white rhinoceroses named Fatu, one of seven still alive,
and from a drill, a monkey species that lives in tiny, dwindling pockets of west Africa.
And recently, scientists said they have created ips cells from a snow leopard. These cells are a long way from saving species,
but"it would be the only chance that I can think of that would prevent the extinction of the northern white rhino,
 Ryder says. Ryder shrugs off the suggestion that money devoted towards such ambitious cloning projects would be spent better on preventing habitat destruction and other, simpler conservation measures.
Fighting over the best way to save species instead of saving them will, to future generations, look like"fiddling
though he does not underestimate the effort required to bring the passenger pigeon back to the skies.
With extinct animals, scientists need to take more involved measures to recover the complete DNA sequence oe its genome.
Armed with this code, they then need to find a way of engineering a regular pigeon's stem cells into behaving like a passenger pigeon's stem cells by mutating the genome.
Church says the complete genome of the passenger pigeon from museum specimens will soon be published and researchers are beginning to alter the genetic make-up of a more familiar bird oe the chicken oe to practice their techniques."
"What you can do for chicken you should be able to do for pigeon, and that can include creating DNA that you haven't seen alive for a 100 years,
 he says. But even if Church has the passenger pigeon's full genetic code, which he expects to recreate within a decade,
Church admits that bringing it back to life requires a significant improvement in existing genome engineering technologies.
his team is using a similar approach to engineer mice with traits of naked mole rats. The odd-looking rodents live dozens of years instead of a handful like mice.
They are impervious to cancer and do not feel pain from acids. To endow ordinary lab mice with these traits Church will try to partially rewrite the genomes of mouse stem cells.
However, he admits that creating a passenger pigeon from the stem cells of an ordinary pigeon would involve a massive scale up of the same technologies.
Mammoth goalthe favourite candidate for resurrection, though, might lie in nature's version of Ryder's Frozen Zoo.
Flash-frozen remains of wooly mammoths have been found preserved under the Siberian permafrost, and scientists hope their bones could be a source of DNA-containing marrow cells for cloning.
Last year, Japanese and Russian scientists announced they had found just such a bone and predicted they would be able to clone a mammoth within 5 years.
They hope to insert nuclei from the mammoth cells into egg cells from its closest living relative, the elephant,
and carry the mammoth embryo in an elephant's womb. However, some scientists have cast doubt about
whether this is possible. Hendrik Poinar, a palaeo-geneticist at Mcmaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and his team have uncovered similarly well-preserved mammoth bones and never found viable cells or nuclei."
"The likelihood of finding an intact cell that can be rejigged to life oe it's not that it's an impossibility oe
 Poinar says that genome engineering offers a more realistic shot at resurrecting woolly mammoths and other long-extinct species. Ten thousand-year-old cells and their nuclei may be degraded too to be used in cloning,
but they still contain the animal's genetic code. This genome is shredded into short fragments,
and more ancient animal genomes are on the way, such as the Tasmanian tiger. These genomes exist in the form of computerised data,
but they could serve as a blueprint for altering the DNA of a cell from a closely related species. For instance,
the code of a woolly mammoth's genome differs from an African elephant's by roughly 240,000 DNA letters out of a total of 4 billion,
An elephant ips cell engineered to contain those mutations would theoretically be capable of producing woolly mammoth sperm.
the woolly mammoth stem cells could be implanted besides an elephant embryo early in development, producing a chimera animal with some tissues made from elephant cells and others from mammoths.
In some individuals the mammoth cells would contribute to sperm or eggs, and these cells be used to create a genuine mammoth through IVF.
In the absence of a living mammoth, scientists are reconstructing some of its most vital components from DNA fragments to discover how it adapted to life at subzero temperatures.
Scientists could go one step further and test woolly mammoth red blood cells made from ips cells, Poinar says.
Reality check If the idea of mammoths roaming the Earth still sounds a bit farfetched, it should.
Resurrecting a mammoth or indeed any extinct species would require a dizzying list of technological leaps in genome engineering, reproductive biology,
What is more, the technologies that scientists are hoping to use have mostly been developed for use in laboratory animals and valuable livestock only.
Basic genetic principles may carry over to more exotic animals but many steps will not, particularly those involving reproduction and development.
For instance, a recent study found that making a chimeric rhesus monkey oe a process needed to resurrect a monkey species from frozen cells oe is much trickier than a mouse."
humans resurrect an extinct animal. A wealthy American investor approached him several years ago and asked Poinar to quit his academic job and work full time on bringing back woolly mammoths.
Poinar declined, but he expects someone will eventually take on a similar project.""The technology clearly moves at lighting speed
 Harvard's Church says his goal is not necessarily to fill the planet with mammoths
There could even be an upside for other animals on the brink of extinction.""If there's enough people enthusiastic about bringing an extinct species like a mammoth or passenger pigeon,
 says Church, "maybe there will be interest in maintaining the species we still have.  Ewen Callaway writes about biology
"Previously we just raised food for humans and animals. In 2011 more corn went to biofuel than to feed for the first time in the US.
can play the songs of more than 900 bird species. Using microphones, it can also capture the chirps
and warbles of wild birds and match them against a database of bird sounds to help the oereader identify the species
Fans voted for Jessica to go stag and thats how Reinbold-Gee wrote it. Textnovel, which is funded by contributions from its own members,
On Scribd. com, writers and digital packrats are building a huge swap meet for written works of every length, many
The risk is that we become mindless ants following endless crumbs of digital data. oepeople tend to ask
Steve Hundley dumped his Jaguar convertible. He stopped taking Baltic cruises. And he stopped buying his wife pricey jewelry.
500 for an outdoor artisan pizza oven. oewe dont need the Jaguar or cruises to the Baltic,
Similar to growing coral in the oceans or crystals in a laboratory growing rocks may become an expansive new area of farming.
#In a plutonomy there is no such animal as the U s. consumer#or the UK consumer,
Fat cats who owe it to their grandfathers are not getting all of the gains, #Peter Lindert told me.
and Financial times columnist Martin Wolf, and leading them in discussion of matters ranging from global financial imbalances to the war in Afghanistan.
arguably the most coveted status symbol isn t a yacht, a racehorse, or a knighthood;
and can solve whatever new problems this fledgling new industry blows their way. 18. Data Hostage Specialists Holding people as hostages is very messy.
Extinction Revivalists People who revive extinct animals. 38. Robotic Earthworm Drivers The most valuable land on the planet will soon be the landfills
because that is where we have buried our most valuable natural resources. In the future, robotic earthworms will be used to silently mine the landfills
and replace whatever is extracted with high-grade soil. 39. Gravity Pullers The first wave of people to unlock the code for influencing gravity. 40.
or bird damage that leaves most apples somewhat marginalized. They may be perfectly good on the inside,
a number of related technologies have emerged giving the fledgling new industry a number of new options.
We have other types of molecules that make up plants and animals, but on the molecular level there is no such thing as vegetarian and non-vegetarian molecules.
and offices are now creating information layers that will touch every plant and animal on our planet as well.
With scars from the heyday of Webvan and Pets. com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, Isnt this just a dangerous new bubble?#
maker of Angry Birds, is expected to clear $100 million in revenue this year (the company was nearly bankrupt
The iphone and ipad have about 700,000 apps, from Instagram to Angry Birds. Yet with the American economy yielding few good opportunities in recent years, there is debate about how real,
As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.##The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists
and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew Mcafee, economists at the Massachusetts institute of technology, made the case for a rapid transformation.
and almost all of the precise work is done by robots that string together solar cells and seal them under glass.
The assembly line here is made up of dozens of glass cages housing robots made by Adept Technology that snake around the factory floor for more than 100 yards.
as well as the petting-zoo layout that encourages customers to test-drive products. But Apple s success, it turns out, rests on a set of intangibles;
as it s known, this time with pointers on the elaborate etiquette of interacting with customers.
and tablets, says Mark Rolston of the design firm Frog, is that they re confined by a screen.
And unlike Angry Birds on your phone, Strap Game (that s the official name) will alert you
The Kindness Hack Researchers at Wharton, Yale and Harvard have figured out how to make employees feel less pressed for time:
Instead of short climbing walls, there should be towering monkey bars. Instead of plastic crawl tubes, there should be tall, steep slides.
Robo-petting etting a living animal has long been known to lower blood pressure and release a flood of mood-lifting endorphins.
or your spouse is allergic to dogs#you can t always have a pet around to improve your mental health.
but its sensors allow it to mimic the reaction of a live animal whether you give it a nervous scratch or a slow, calm rub.
#Cow collar texts ranchers when animals are sick or in heat Even cows can benefit from having a mobile device.
monitoring the health of their animals and prevent accidental deaths. The Silent Herdsman collar will track the movements of the cow using the same type of sensors found in Wii devices.
if their animals are in heat, going into labor or in distress. Researchers also hope to determine which movements the sensor will pick up to determine
and technological development in general#hen clearly a less high-tech approach would be just as or even more effective#s just delusional.
1.)Mood-Driven Chameleon Wear Yes, most people will go out of their way to avoid having their clothing overtly display their emotional state.
Think of this as a wearable CAT scan system with variable-adjust focal point settings zoom powers down to a near-nano scale,
nano-netting will provide a fibrous support structure that is visually non-intrusive but capable of keeping out insects, birds,
and other unwanted animals. The density of the netting can be adjusted to match specific requirements.
Parrot officially unveiled the follow-up to its popular quadrocopter at CES AR Drone 2. 0 Flying Drones
Auquaponics Tech For those of you not familiar with the term, aquaponics is a sustainable food production system that combines traditional aquaculture (raising aquatic animals such as fish, crayfish,
or swarms, inspired by the behavior observed in social insects, called swarm intelligence. So far no swarmbots have made their way to CES. 25.
or bird damage that leaves most apples somewhat marginalized. They may be perfectly good on the inside,
and take pity on turtles, cause fender benders, pileups, and head-on collisions. They nod off at the wheel,
or to track mosquitoes, or that he belonged to an lite team of ghost hunters.
As a commercial for the Dodge Charger put it two years ago, #oehands-free driving, cars that park themselves,
Its Firebird III concept car#haped like a jet fighter, with titanium tail fins and a glass-bubble cockpit#as designed to run on a test track embedded with an electrical cable,
like a baby giraffe finding its legs, then suddenly, confidently circles the field#s if guided by an invisible hand.
avoid big rocks#hen sent out to test them by trial and error. This is slow, painstaking work, but it s easier to predict
drive for twenty minutes, realize there was some software bug, then sit there for four hours reprogramming
when a collision seems imminent#hen the car ahead breaks hard, for example, or another vehicle swerves erratically into traffic.
The attack came from Chrysler, the smallest of Detroit s Big Three automakers, in the form of a television commercial for the new Dodge Charger.
In the ad, the Charger is traveling through a long gloomy tunnel, the camera tracking with it.
They drove teams of horses, herds of goats, drifts of sheep. Animals, Smith argues, are autonomous.
Thus, in the eyes of the law, an autonomous vehicle is arguably similar to a horse-drawn buggy.
And under the Geneva convention, a basic legal requirement for drivers#hether of animals or of cars#s the same.
The driver must have control. Who has control of a driverless car? For the autonomous vehicle that now drives Levandowski to work, the answer (according to Smith) is logical:
and oversight to guard against situations like a deer running into the road; the car must be able to hand back control with no warning.
which coral protects itself from UV rays through its relationship with a symbiotic algae that lives within it.
which is converted by the coral into its own UV-blocking sunscreen, benefiting not only the coral
and the algae but also the fish that feed on the coral. This transference has led scientists to believe that
if the compound can be isolated, it could potentially be modified into a human oral sunscreen that would protect both the skin and the eyes.
even though many species of animals are able to completely regrow lost parts. It s long been known that alligators are lost able toregrow teeth, for example,
like snakes shedding their skin periodically. Scientists have discovered recently that this is not the case: An alligator s tooth will grow back automatically to replace a lost one.
While currently focusing on people and cars, they d like to add animals and weather conditions soon. 3. Wireless Electricity The notion of wireless electric power has been around far longer than one might think:
They grew row crops-grain and corn,#oehad a couple of horses, occasionally had some cattle, but not usually,#Oster explained.
Hyperloop, while similar in the broad sense, is a different animal. The cars are bigger
A 1973 NASA document summarizing the biological effects of vacuums on mammals gives you 10 seconds of consciousness
One reason for the cassava miracle has been the ongoing breeding of improved varieties that are more resistant to disease, pest, and drought.
Weevil infestations caused postharvest losses as high as 50 percent until Purdue University researchers discovered that storing the cowpeas in airtight containers could preserve the crop for up to a year.
the rugged bags provide an airtight seal for long-term, pest-free storage. The Gates Foundation estimates that by using them,
Starting in the 1970s, researchers in Nigeria successfully bred varieties of cassava that are more resistant to pests
and insects, germinate seeds, and allow farmers to add manure. Near-desert plots are transformed gradually into small, narrow fields in
when Mrs. Baird became disconsolate at discovering that rats had broken into the family s sole remaining bag of corn.
or resist insect pests. This has allowed farmers to increase yields and spray less pesticide than they might have otherwise.
a plant modified to produce a bacterial toxin that discourages destructive bollworms and cuts down on the need for pesticides.
The key is an alarm pheromone that some species of wild plant have evolved to mimic the chemical warning signals put out by aphids#a major crop pest in the temperate zones
Putting the genes for this defense into wheat has created a crop that could trick the insects into thinking that they are in peril and drive them away.
Unlike Bt cotton and other existing GM organisms, such a crop would need no insect-killing chemical for protection from pests.
Corning, whose toughened Gorilla glass became the screen of choice for many smartphones, will provide phones with curved glass edges as soon as this year.
A Samsung concept shows off a tablet-sized screen that can be rolled up Even after the success of Gorilla Glass,
#Japanese scientists create 581 clones from the same mouse Scientists clone 581 mice from one mouse.
They have managed to push the technique to new limits by cloning 581 mice all from a single original cell.
If their results can be replicated in other animals it could provide a way for virtually unlimited supplies of genetically superior farm animals or other animals important to research.
scientists had established already a long history of cloning mammals. The first was a genetically identical mouse produced in 1979.
Shortly thereafter the first genetically identical cows chickens, and sheep were produced. What made Dolly a sensation,
scientist have used SCNT to clone other mammals including cat, dog, deer, horse, mule, ox, rabbit and rat.
the authors of the current work were able to clone a mouse to the sixth generation but just barely.
and cats went no further than the third generation. Frustrated scientists attempted to find out why successive cloning was progressively problematic.
For example, a series of cloned mice were shown to express an RNA molecule that inactivated one of the female s X chromosomes.
When the RNA molecule was removed cloning efficiency of the mice increased nearly ninefold. Based on previous work, the Japanese researchers sought to improve their cloning efficiency by using a chemical called trichostatin A that inhibits the powerful epigenetic protein histone deacetylase.
the inhibitor allowed them to produce 581 mice through 25 rounds of SCNT cloning. The mice were healthy
and were able to reproduce. What s more the cloning success rate did not decrease with each generation.
If the inhibitor is equally effective in other animals, the technique opens up the possibility of cloning highly-valued animals such as prized cattle or racehorses,
or genetically modified animals used in medical research. As the authors note in the study:#
#oeour results show that repeated iterative recloning is possible and suggest that, with adequately efficient techniques,
it may be possible to reclone animals indefinitely.##That s good news for those that have turned already to cloning to create a small pack ofsuper sniffing inspector dogs at airports,
cows that produced humanized milk, evenolympic horses. Cloning remains a young science and scientists no doubt have a long list of organisms they would like to clone.
If the current technique means limitless return on one s cloning efforts, it could entice more scientists to take the first step,
animals and fungi, revolutionizing genetic engineering. The protein, called Cas9, is quite simply a way to more accurately cut a piece of DNA.#
Caribou Biosciences, to commercialize her work. In the short term, Church says, the potential of cas9 is that it could be used to study genetics in a way that was heretofore impossible.
But this is the kind of technology that one would use to bring back Neanderthals or, for that matter, mammoths, when their actual DNA is lost to time.
or an elephant (in the case of the mammoth) to match a prehistoric relative. If you want to bring back ice age animals,
Cas9 might be the way to do it. Anything like that is a long way off. Right now, scientists are using this technology largely on cells in laboratory dishes, not on whole organisms.
So how long will it be before we see a revived version of the passenger pigeon (extinct in 1914), the Tasmanian tiger (extinct in 1936),
and the woolly mammoth (extinct over 3, 000 years ago) roaming the earth again? It will probably come as a surprise to most to learn that the first revival of an extinct species has occurred already.
if California condors go extinct, it s unclear if they could ever be brought back fully, because young condors rely on their parents for training.
will revived a species learn to adapt to its new environment? Will they be able to reproduce in sufficient number to ever be fully viable?
or will those differences make them ultra-adaptable where they will thrive to the point of becoming a pest to their surroundings.
among others. 2.)Cloning with cells from cryopreserved tissue of a recently extinct animal can generate viable eggs.
If the technique proves successful (such as with the passenger pigeon), it might be applied to the many other extinct species that have left their#oeancient DNA#in museum specimens
and animals are one thing, but when it comes to tampering with humans the stakes get much higher.
when he recommended the slaughter of 40,000 elephants to help prevent desertification, only later to realize that elephant grazing itself was highly beneficial to thwart the encroachment of the desert.
Brand ended his talk with, #oehumans made a huge hole in nature, and we have a moral obligation to repair the damage.#
if we bring some of our extinct animals back? Are the close proximities of animals that Brand describes close enough,
or is this a dangerous area to be playing in? I d love to hear your thoughts?
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