Dolly - First mammal to be cloned

Dolly - First mammal to be cloned

Dolly was a female domestic sheep, and the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell, using the process of nuclear transfer. She was cloned by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and colleagues at the Roslin Institute, part of the University of Edinburgh. She was born on 5 July 1996 and she lived until the age of six, at which point she died from a progressive lung disease. The cell used as the donor for the cloning of Dolly was taken from a mammary gland, and the production of a healthy clone therefore proved that a cell taken from a specific part of the body could recreate a whole individual.

Dolly was created using the technique of somatic cell nuclear transfer, where the cell nucleus from an adult cell is transferred into an unfertilised oocyte (developing egg cell) that has had its nucleus removed. The hybrid cell is then stimulated to divide by an electric shock, and when it develops into a blastocyst it is implanted in a surrogate mother. Dolly was the first clone produced from a cell taken from an adult mammal. The production of Dolly showed that genes in the nucleus of such a mature differentiated somatic cell are still capable of reverting to an embryonic totipotent state, creating a cell that can then go on to develop into any part of an animal. Dolly's existence was announced to the public on 22 February 1997.

Dolly lived her entire life at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. There she was bred with a Welsh Mountain ram and produced six lambs in total. Her first lamb, named Bonnie, was born in April 1998. The next year Dolly produced twin lambs Sally and Rosie, and she gave birth to triplets Lucy, Darcy and Cotton in the year after that. In the autumn of 2001, at the age of four, Dolly developed arthritis and began to walk stiffly, but this was successfully treated with anti-inflammatory drugs.

On 14 February 2003, Dolly was euthanized because she had a progressive lung disease and severe arthritis. A Finn Dorset such as Dolly has a life expectancy of around 11 to 12 years, but Dolly lived to be only six years of age. A post-mortem examination showed she had a form of lung cancer called Jaagsiekte, which is a fairly common disease of sheep and is caused by the retrovirus JSRV. Such lung diseases are a particular danger for sheep kept indoors, and Dolly had to sleep inside for security reasons.

After cloning was successfully demonstrated through the production of Dolly, many other large mammals have been cloned, including horses and bulls. Cloning may have uses in preserving endangered species and may become a viable tool for reviving extinct species. Cloning of domesticated animals could be important in the future production of transgenic livestock.

Boy finds 30,000-year-old mammoth remains

The fossilised remains. (Photo: Vesti TV)

Boy finds 30,000-year-old mammoth remains

A boy living in Russia's remote north has found the well-preserved remains of a 30,000-year-old adult mammoth, according to media reports.

The discovery was made near a weather station in the eastern Taimyr region, some 3000km northeast of Moscow.

News reports identified the boy as Yevgeny Salinder, son of a couple working at the Sopkarga polar weather station.

Salinder reportedly discovered the animal during a walk. News reports said the remains were that of a male mammoth aged 15 or 16 years, and that its skin, meat, fat hump and organs were extremely well-preserved.

According to the Pravda.ru news website, the last time mammoth remains of such quality were discovered in Russia was in 1901.

Scientists used axes, picks and a steam-blaster to melt the permafrost in an extraction operation lasting a week, the report said.

The mammoth probably died in the summer because it lacked an undercoat and had a large reserve of fat, the report said quoting Aleksei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

(Source)

Mysterious Baltic Sea Object

Mysterious Baltic Sea Object

A feature on the floor of the Baltic Sea that was discovered last summer by Swedish treasure hunters is making headlines once again.

The latest media coverage draws upon an hour-long radio interview with Peter Lindberg, head of the Ocean X Team (which made the "discovery"), in which Lindberg delivers a string of cryptic and titillating statements about the "strange" and "mysterious" seafloor object his team has been exploring for a year.

Lindberg discusses various possibilities for what the object might be: "It has these very strange stair formations, and if it is constructed, it must be constructed tens of thousands of years ago before the Ice Age," he said in the radio interview. (The peak of the most recent Ice Age occurred some 20,000 years ago.)

"If this is Atlantis, that would be quite amazing," he said. Atlantis is a mythical underwater city referred to in ancient legends.

Lindberg acknowledges that the object could instead be a natural formation, such as a meteorite that penetrated the ice during the Ice Age, or an underwater volcano; however, he gives the impression that scientists are baffled by it.

(Source)

 

Skipper finds bottle with message nearly a century old

Skipper finds bottle with message nearly a century old

A Scottish skipper has hauled in what could be his most unusual catch - a bottle containing a message written 98 years ago.

Andrew Leaper was pulling in his nets when the bottle appeared.

To his amazement, he discovered on opening it that it contained a message asking the finder to record the date and location of where it was found and return it to director of the Scotland Fishery Board to collect a sixpence reward.

Further investigation revealed that the bottle - 646B - had been set adrift as part of 1,890 by Captain CH Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation.

It was designed to sink and float close to the seabed to monitor currents.

Only 315 of the bottles have ever been found.

(Source)

Ancient Roman road found in Greece

Ancient Roman road found in Greece

Archaeologists in Greece's second-largest city have uncovered a 70-metre section of an ancient road built by the Romans that was city's main travel artery nearly 2,000 years ago.

The marble-paved road was unearthed during excavations for Thessaloniki's new subway system, which is due to be completed in four years. Several of the large marble paving stones were etched with children's board games, while others were marked by horse-drawn cart wheels. Also discovered at the site were remains of tools and lamps, as well as the bases of marble columns.

About seven metres below ground in the center of the city, the ancient road follows in roughly the same direction as the city's modern Egnatia Avenue.

(Source)

Prometheus Tree - The oldest tree in the world



The cut stump of the Prometheus tree

Prometheus tree was the oldest known non-clonal organism, a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus longaeva) tree growing near the tree line on Wheeler Peak in eastern Nevada, United States. The tree, which was at least 4862 years old and possibly more than 5000 years, was cut down in 1964 by a graduate student and United States Forest Service personnel for research purposes. The name of the tree refers to the mythological figure Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man.

Cutting down of Prometheus was an important factor in the movement to protect bristlecones and the Wheeler Peak groves in particular. There had been a movement to protect the mountain and contiguous areas in a national park before the incident, and 22 years later the area gained national park status.

(Source)

Length of The Great Wall of China

A new archaeological study, which started in 2007 and took five years to complete, has measured the Great Wall of China at 21,196.18km long - that is well over twice as long as the previous mark of 8,850km.

It seems the discrepancy in the original distance is down to the fact the previous mark of 8,850km was largely based on historical records.

The Great Wall was originally built more than 2,200 years ago to protect China's north border from foreign invaders.

Bluey - The oldest dog ever lived

Bluey (7 June 1910 – 14 November 1939) was an Australian cattle dog owned by Les and Esma Hall of Rochester, Victoria, Australia, which, according to an anecdotal report, lived 29 years, 6 months and 12 days, but the record is unverified. Bluey holds the world record for the oldest dog, according to Guinness World Records, who cite the anecdotal reports as being "reliable".

The Australian Cattle Dog is a breed of herding dog originally developed in Australia for droving cattle over long distances across rough terrain. In the 19th century, New South Wales cattle farmer Thomas Hall crossed the dogs used by drovers in his parents' home county, Northumberland, with dingoes he had tamed. The resulting dogs were known as Halls Heelers. After Hall's death in 1870, the dogs became available beyond the Hall family and their associates, and were subsequently developed into two modern breeds, the Australian Cattle Dog and the Australian Stumpy Tail Cattle Dog.

(Source)

Ghost Ship

The Baychimo was a steel 1,322 ton cargo steamer built in 1914 in Sweden and owned by the Hudson's Bay Company, used to trade provisions for pelts in Inuit settlements along the Victoria Island coast of the Northwest Territories of Canada. She became a notable ghost ship along the Alaska coast, being abandoned in 1931 and seen numerous times since then until her last sighting in 1969.

On October 1, 1931,  Baychimo became trapped in pack ice. The crew briefly abandoned the ship, traveling over a half-mile of ice to the town of Barrow to take shelter for two days, but the ship had broken free of the ice by the time the crew returned. The ship became mired again on October 8, more thoroughly this time, and on October 15 the Hudson's Bay Company sent aircraft to retrieve 22 of the crew. 15 crew remained behind, intending to wait out the winter if necessary, and they constructed a wooden shelter some distance away. On November 24 a powerful blizzard struck, and after it abated there was no sign of the Baychimo; the skipper concluded that she must have broken up and sunk in the storm. A few days later, however, an Inuit seal hunter informed them that he had seen the Baychimo about 45 mi (72 km) away from their position. The 15 men proceeded to track the ship down and, deciding that the ship was unlikely to survive the winter, retrieved the most valuable furs from the hold to transport by air. The Baychimo was abandoned.

The Baychimo did not sink, however, and over the next several decades there were numerous sightings of the ship. People managed to board her several times, but each time they were either unequipped to salvage the ship or driven away again by bad weather. The last recorded sighting of the Baychimo was by a group of Inuit in 1969, 38 years after she was abandoned. She was stuck fast in the pack ice of the Beaufort Sea between Point Barrow and Icy Cape in the Chukchi Sea off the northwestern Alaskan coast. Baychimo's ultimate fate is unknown and is presumed sunk.

(Source)

World’s longest ship

Seawise Giant was the longest ship ever built. The massive ship was built in 1979 by a Greek shipping magnate, but was soon bought by a Hong Kong shipping magnate, who expanded its size.

After the refit, the ship had a capacity of 564,763 metric tons, a length overall of 458.45 m (1,504.1 ft.) and a draft of 24.611 m (80.74 ft.). The ship had 46 tanks, 31,541 square metres (339,500 sq. ft.) of deck space.

Seawise Giant was damaged during the Iran–Iraq War by an Iraqi air force attack while transiting the Strait of Hormuz on 14 May 1988 and carrying Iranian crude oil.

(Source)

Scientists have found soft tissue on dinosaurs

After 68 million years in the ground, a Tyrannosaurus rex found in Montana was dug up, its leg bone was broken in pieces, and fragments were dissolved in acid in Schweitzer’s laboratory at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

The discovery was astonishing.  The scientist Dr. Mary Schweitzer discovered blood vessels and structures that looked like whole cells inside that T. rex bone—the first observation of its kind. No one ever imagined that even a trace of still-soft dinosaur tissue could survive. When an animal dies, soft tissues such as blood vessels, muscle and skin decay and disappear over time, while hard tissues like bone may gradually acquire minerals from the environment and become fossils. Schweitzer, one of the first scientists to use the tools of modern cell biology to study dinosaurs, has upended the conventional wisdom by showing that some rock-hard fossils tens of millions of years old may have remnants of soft tissues hidden away in their interiors.

(Source)

42,000-year-old mammoth baby

Photo by TYRONE SIU/REUTERS

Lyuba, the 1-month old baby mammoth of the Ice Age, died 42,000 years ago and was preserved in the ice. She was found by a reindeer herder in Siberia in 2007. By far, she is the best preserved mammoth mummy in the world. Although her fur and toenails have disintegrated, her skin and internal organs are intact. Apparently, there were traces of her mother’s milk in her stomach. Scientists hope to gain insight into what caused Ice Age mammals, including the mammoths, to become extinct at the end of the Pleistocene era around 10,000 years ago.

(Source)

World’s oldest mammal - a giant bowhead whale that had a 130-year old harpoon stuck in its neck.

A giant bowhead whale caught off the coast of Alaska in 2007 had a harpoon point embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt more than a century ago.

Biologists claim the find helps prove the bowhead is the oldest living mammal on earth.

They say the 13-centimetre arrow-shaped fragment dates back to around 1880, meaning the 50-ton whale had been coasting around the freezing arctic waters since Victorian times. The weapon fragment lodged in a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade comes from a 19th century bomb lance.

Because traditional whale hunters never took calves, experts estimate the bowhead was several years old when it was first shot and about 130 when it died in 2007.

Calculating a bowhead whale's age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses.

It is rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts now believe the oldest were close to 200 years old.

(Source)

Titanoboa - the largest snake

Titanoboa snake was discovered by a team of North American scientists at the University of Toronto. It's the latest fossil to emerge from Colombia's Cerrejon coal mine in 2005.

The giant serpent is closely related to today's boas and anacondas, snakes that kill their prey with suffocating coils. Titanoboa's fossilised vertebra showed that it was a whopping 13 metres (42 feet) long. It was also a hefty creature and weighed in at over 1.3 tons. That's almost thirty times as heavy as the anaconda, the bulkiest species alive today. Its superlative measurements mean that Titanoboa was not only the largest snake in history, but also the largest land-living vertebrate following the demise of the dinosaurs.

It lived some 58-60 million years ago, when the Cerrejon basin was a giant floodplain, criss-crossed by rivers and nestled within a large tropical rainforest. This is exactly the type of habitat that anacondas thrive in today, and it's likely that Titanoboa shared a similar lifestyle. It may well have been aquatic and hunted similar prey, like crocodiles. Indeed, other fossils from the Cerrejon pit include early relatives of fishes, turtles and crocodiles - all suitable prey for Titanoboa.

(Source)

Prehistoric flower blooms again after 30000 years

Biologists have revived a 30,000-year-old plant that last flowered when ancient woolly mammoths roamed the Earth.

Cultivated from fruit tissues that were recovered from frozen sediment in Siberia, Silene stenophylla is by far the oldest to be brought back from the dead.

The previous record holder was a sacred lotus, which dated back about 1200 years.

The late researchers in Moscow, Russia, recovered the fruits of the ice age flowering plant from a fossilised squirrel burrow in frozen sediments near the Kolyma river in north-east Siberia.

Radiocarbon dating of the fruit suggested that the squirrel hoarded it around 31,800 years ago, just before the ice rolled in.

By applying growth hormones to the fruit tissue, the researchers managed to initiate cell division and ultimately produce a practical flowering plant.

(Source)

Oldest living thing on earth' discovered

Photo: Getty Images

Ancient patches of a giant seagrass in the Mediterranean Sea are now considered the oldest living organism on Earth after scientists dated them as up to 200,000 years old.

Australian scientists sequenced the DNA of samples of the giant seagrass, Posidonia oceanic, from 40 underwater meadows in an area spanning more than 2,000 miles, from Spain to Cyprus.

The analysis, published in the journal PLos ONE, found the seagrass was between 12,000 and 200,000 years old and was most likely to be at least 100,000 years old. This is far older than the current known oldest species, a Tasmanian plant that is believed to be 43,000 years old.

Read more.

Towns that “died for France”

Sign indicating the site of the destroyed village of Fleury-devant-Douaumont

During the First World War, many villages in the French département of Meuse were destroyed by the fighting. After the war, it was decided that the land previously occupied by the destroyed villages would not be incorporated into other communes, as a testament to these villages which had “died for France”, as they were declared, and to preserve their memory. While three of the villages were subsequently rebuilt and are governed as normal communes, the other six are entirely unpopulated and are managed by a council of three members, appointed by the prefect of Meuse.

(Source)

Teeth of Ancient Mayans

The Mayas were a peaceful people with a highly developed culture who inhabited the Yucatan Peninsula. They were accomplished smelters and forgers of gold, silver, and bronze in addition to being highly skilled in cutting, polishing, and engraving precious and semiprecious stones.

Despite these skills, they did not perform restorative or corrective dental procedures. The skills they developed for working on teeth were for ritual or religious purposes. The Mayas were skilled in the fabrication and placement of beautifully carved stone inlays in precisely prepared cavities in the front teeth. These inlays were made of various minerals, including jadeite, iron pyrites, hematite, turquoise, quartz, serpentine, and cinnabar.

A round, hard tube was spun between the hands or in a rope drill, with a slurry of powdered quartz in water as an abrasive, to cut a perfectly round hole through the tooth enamel. The inlay was then cemented into place. The stone inlay was ground to fit the cavity so precisely that many have remained in the teeth for thousands of years.

(Source)

Brain stays active after you get decapitated

At one time in history, decapitation was one of the preferred methods of execution. There's nothing more final than the severing of one's head. But how quick is it? If your head were cut off, would you still be able to see or otherwise move it, even for just a few seconds?

This concept perhaps first appeared during the French Revolution, the very time period in which the guillotine was created. On July 17, 1793, a woman named Charlotte Corday was executed by guillotine for the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, a radical journalist, politician and revolutionary. After the blade dropped and Corday's head fell, one of the executioner's assistants picked it up and slapped its cheek. According to witnesses, Corday's eyes turned to look at the man and her face changed to an expression of indignation.

Read more.

The oldest pair of socks from the 4th century

These socks were made in the 4th to 5th century, and were excavated in Egypt at the end of the 19th century. They have a divided toe and are designed to be worn with sandals.

They were made in the technique nålbindning, sometimes called knotless netting or single needle knitting - a technique closer to sewing than knitting. These socks were made using three-ply wool.
Some believe that this technique was a forerunner of the faster method of knitting with two or more needles.

(Source)