Tag: science

New Bioscience Company Raises $15 Million to Revive Woolly Mammoth

Boasting a whopping $15 million in funding, a newly formed bioscience company hopes to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction. Dubbed ‘Colossal,’ the organization is reportedly spearheaded by technology entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church. The first stage of the ambitious project will be centered around producing a hybrid creature, of sorts, comprised of Asian elephant DNA that has been infused with woolly mammoth genes that are responsible for the animal’s iconic hairy coat and bodily characteristics that allow it to withstand freezing temperatures. Ultimately, Church explained, “our goal is to make a cold-resistant elephant, but it is going to look and behave like a mammoth.”

The purpose of this endeavor goes beyond merely bringing a mammoth-like creature into our modern world to demonstrate the awesome power of science as the company foresees the hypothetical animal as a way of both helping to stave off the extinction of Asian elephants, which are a threatened species, and also preserve the climate of the Arctic tundra. Their reasoning for the latter goal is that if that region of the world were once again populated by the massive pachyderms, the animals would naturally knock down trees and cause grasslands to emerge while also compacting the permafrost beneath them.

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Jeff Bezos Is Building a 10,000-Year Clock Inside a Mountain

Engineers and contractors are building a massive, multi-room clock inside a mountain in West Texas—a clock that will tell time for the next 10,000 years. And despite an informal website with a whiff of Blogspot template, this is a Jeff Bezos project.

There are a lot of surprises in the story of the Clock of the Long Now. It’s the brainchild of Danny Hillis, a computer scientist and entrepreneur who first imagined the 10,000-year clock in 1986. Now, he’s a visiting professor at MIT Media Lab with a reputation for building supercomputers, autonomous dinosaur robots, and Disney theme park rides. He’s exactly the kind of guy who decides he wants to build a huge eon clock in a mountain.

How does the clock work? Well, the longness of the time involved is the big engineering challenge. The clock is designed to tick just once a year and chime once per millennium. Experts are blasting rooms out of the interior of the mountain in order to install steampunky piles of gears and flywheels. According to Bezos, the Amazon founder and richest man on the planet, the clock will be 500 feet tall, “all mechanical, powered by day/night thermal cycles,” and “synchronized at solar noon.”

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Dr. Scott Atlas: Science Killed Itself Over COVID-19

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the American people have been told to “follow the science.” Yet for a year and a half, they’ve heard contradicting messages from self-appointed prophets of “the science” like Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

We learned that politicians who claimed their decisions were science-driven often ignored scientific findings that didn’t fit certain political narratives. We discovered that scientists are fallible human beings, and some would let personal interests and political views cloud their judgment.

Is science itself one of the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic? I asked Dr. Scott Atlas at the 13th annual Freedom Conference hosted by the Steamboat Institute, a Colorado-based nonprofit organization. Formerly a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, Atlas is now a senior fellow in health policy at the Hoover Institution.

Atlas has been under constant attacks by the left and the corporate media since he served as a special adviser to former President Trump and a member of the White House coronavirus task force from August to November 2020. The New York Times and the Washington Post ran hit pieces on Atlas, questioning his qualifications despite his distinguished career and scholarship.

Google-owned YouTube also removed a 50-minute video of Atlas’s interview with the Hoover Institute. Twitter took down his tweet that questioned the effectiveness of masks.

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The Horrifying Study That Predicted Human Extinction

“Universe 25” was a study carried out from 1954 to 1972 by John B. Calhoun, an American ethologist and behavioral researcher who claimed bleak effects of overpopulation on rodents were a grim model for the future of the human race.

Working with NIMH ( National Institute of Mental Health ), Calhoun created the perfect Mouse Universe to conduct his study. What looked like a rat utopia and mouse paradise — unlimited food and water, multiple levels and private nesting areas— quickly spiraled into turbulent congestion that lead to a population subside followed by disturbing and pathological behaviors of the members.

Calhoun spent years perfecting his methods and repeated his experiment 25 times — hence “Universe 25″ — in different scales and noted ominously identical results every time.

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Judge rules Michigan’s storing of babies blood, use for research is unconstitutional

It happens when every baby is born in Michigan, blood sample is taken from the newborn.

But a judge has ruled the way the state of Michigan does this, is most likely unconstitutional.

Its a complicated legal ruling, but it may pave the way for changes in the newborn health screening process.

“They don’t tell the parents, they don’t explain it to the parents, they just do it,” says Saginaw County attorney Phil Ellison.

He is talking about the state of Michigan’s program where it takes a sample of blood from every newborn shortly after birth.

The blood is taken to test for diseases. He represents four parents and nine children, who claim the parents didn’t consent to have those blood samples stored and used in research.

A lawsuit was filed in 2018, claiming their constitutional rights were violated and recently a federal judge, in part, agreed.

“He ruled that the two parents of the two children who were born before May 1st 2010, had their constitutional substantive due process rights violated, basically your right to be a parent was violated when the government, being the state of Michigan, kept, retained without permission or consent the blood spots or blood samples of children that they had taken during the newborn screening process,” says Ellison.

The judge also ruled the process for blood taken from babies born after that May 2010 date, when consent forms for storage and research were in put in place, may also be unconstitutional, but wants to hear from the state on why blood samples are stored and exactly how many.

Millions of blood samples are stored in bio banks in Detroit and Lansing. Ellison says the health screening is important and should be done, but parents should be better informed about the whole process, including how the blood is stored and who has access to it.

“What starts out as a good, probably noble public policy idea of testing children early for diseases, now has turned into, we are going to keep the data, we are going to keep the blood samples , we are going to sell the blood samples, we are going to trade the blood samples, now law enforcement is accessing these samples, we have found out,” says Ellison.

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Human-animal hybrids: Senate approves billions of dollars for their chilling creation

After a long debate, The Senate approved with 68–32 votes a budget of $250 billion to continue with the controversial creation of hybrid beings by mixing human and animal genetic material.

The bill called the “Endless Frontier Act,” was introduced by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, according to Life Site on June 14. 

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) referred to the ethical incompatibility and the need to establish clear definitions on the matter in an attitude of submission to international competition.  

“We shouldn’t need to clarify in law that creating animal-human hybrids or ‘chimeras’ is ethically unthinkable, but sadly the need for that very clear distinction has arrived,” said Lankford, who, along with Sens. Mike Braun R-Ind.), and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) sought to criminalize the creation of such creatures.

He added: “There’s a real difference in taking human cells and injecting them into a mouse for cancer research and for other research. That’s been done, and it’s been done for a very long time, and we’ve had time to be able to process that, but trying to be able to create life is a very different threshold for me.”

Senator Daines noted, “In trying to compete with China, we shouldn’t become like them, It’s critical that we draw a bright line against unethical forms of research that fail to recognize the distinct value of humans over animals.”

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GMO tomato as edible COVID vaccine? Mexican scientists work to make it a reality

While large companies and public sector consortiums in the United States, Canada, China and Europe are running at full speed to develop a vaccine grown in genetically modified (GM) tobacco plants, a research group at a Mexican university is working toward the same objective, but with a different and innovative strategy. They are using bioinformatics and computational genetic engineering to identify candidate antigens for a vaccine that can be expressed in tomato plants. Eating the fruit from these plants would then confer immunity against COVID-19.

At the time I write these lines, there are already more than 3.6 million people reportedly infected by the COVID19 pandemic and some 252,000 deaths globally. In the US, which has the world’s highest rate of infection, COVID-19 deaths have surpassed deaths from cancer, coronary heart disease and even influenza/pneumonia in just the few  months since the novel coronavirus arrived.

This critical situation has led the entire world to embark on a real race to develop a vaccine that immunizes the population against this new strain of coronavirus, which apparently emerged in the autumn of 2019 in China. So far, more than 100 vaccines are being investigated for COVID-19 by universities, public research centers and especially private companies. Some are already under clinical trial.

The approaches used for their production don’t differ much from the ones classically used in vaccines, where the antigens — a compound of the pathogen used to generate immunity in the patient — can be the inactivated virus, as well as the genetic material or a virus protein, which is grown on a large scale in chicken eggs, mammalian/insect cell tissue or genetically modified microorganisms.

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