The best cloning experts strike again! ● A giant comet is headed for the Sun ● Ancient Amorite script, over 4,000 years old, has just been deciphered

The biggest clones strike again!

We wrote about the American company Colossal Biosciences, founded about two years ago with the aim of bringing extinct animals back to life (first the mammoth, then the Tasmanian tiger), and explained what their mission is. Now, after tremendous success, they are announcing a new large-scale project. More precisely, they want to bring dodo birds back to life.

Let’s explain a little about the current successes. When they announced that they were going to revive the mammoths, the cloning specialists raised $60 million in record time, mostly from private investors. Only a few months later, they announced that they also wanted to clone the Tasmanian trig, another extinct species. And the amount in the accounts soared to 150 million dollars. Not even a year has passed since those guys announced the dodo. Another success as they hit $225 million. Not to mention the fact that they occupy the first pages of high-circulation magazines and newspapers every time. It’s so successful because they haven’t cloned anything yet, and it might take a while before you see anything cloned. Maybe some cards.

So far, according to the Americans, they have succeeded in sequencing the genome of the dodo bird from a fossil specimen in Denmark. That was all. The next step, they say, is to compare the bird’s genome with extinct or living relatives to identify the mutations that gave rise to the drone. Based on these, the mentioned specialists want to isolate them and insert them into the egg of an existing bird, having previously freed the egg from other genetic information that they no longer need in this process.

If you’ve heard of the agronomist Trokhym Lysenko, who wanted to turn wheat into barley and then barley into sorghum, all with the help of genetic engineering, that’s what the American project sounds like today.

Other experts, a little more sensible, say that the money would be better used to protect existing species, while others say that even if something does come out of it, it won’t just be the dodo bird. Perhaps the most realistic researchers dot the i’s and say the correct one, i.e. it’s better to drink the money.

By the way, the estimated cost of potentially cloning a mammoth would be $5 million, money that, frankly, any Las Vegas casino would give in a second just to get millions of visitors. They can do that to Siberian tigers, let alone a live mammoth. But that’s it, they also know that you can’t fool the world with a slightly hairier elephant or hybrids that have nothing in common with the original animal except, at the very least, in name.

A giant comet is heading towards the Sun

According to the observations of astronomer David Machholz since 1986, a comet with a diameter of about 6 kilometers is rushing towards the Sun and has almost reached the last part of its journey. In recent years, a comet named 96P/Machholz 1 has been observed by the European Space Agency via the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) space probe.

This comet has a very high chance of coming from outside the solar system. This comes after a chemical analysis of the gas leaving the comet when exposed to solar radiation showed that it was low in carbon and other chemicals found in our native comets. Hence the conclusion that it is not from us.

According to astronomers’ calculations, the comet was thrown out of the solar system by the gravity of a giant planet. Then, after a long journey that may have lasted millions of years, Jupiter gave it another nudge, and the comet arrived yesterday, January 31, at a distance from the Sun three times smaller than that between the Sun and Mercury.

At this distance, most comets would have already been destroyed by solar radiation, but 96P/Machholz 1, given its size, has heroically held on until now. There is also the opinion that the comet would not have formed in another solar system, but at the edge of our system, an area that is still poorly studied and understood. In general, it is good that he went where he went and did not think of going to meet us, because the fascination was about to end.

An ancient Amorite script that is over 4,000 years old has just been deciphered

The equivalent of the famous “Rosetta Stone”, consisting of two clay tablets found in Iraq about 30 years ago, has made it possible to decipher a mysterious script that is more than four millennia old. So mysterious that some linguists and Middle Eastern historians didn’t even believe it existed.

Fortunately, the two tablets were filled with cuneiform characters in both the Amorite and Akkadian scripts that scholars already knew. It is not known how they ended up in a private collection in the USA, but let’s not go into uninteresting details now. It is known for sure that their presence was reported in 2016, and two researchers from Germany and England, respectively, received permission to study them.

Thus it became known that the tablets were basically a kind of conversation guide to help communicate between the Akkadians and the Amorites. Which made the task even easier for two specialists, Manfred Krebernik and Andrew George. They contain greeting formulas, practical advice, information about Shamd gods.

Now, who were the Amorites? This was a biblical people, related to the Canaanites, that is, the Phoenicians, as the ancient Greeks called them. They are also mentioned in the Old Testament as conflicts with the Israelites. They lived west of the Euphrates and were described as a rather nomadic people, but very little is known about them.

They had some disputes with the population of the East at that time, which is almost 4400 years ago, and disappeared about 3900 years ago after being assimilated by the local cultures. This time we have the opportunity to learn more about them and what they were like before. It is important to find out through which collections their cultural treasures are still located.

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