News Feeds

An investigation of the changing behaviour of a single quantum bit through time has uncovered a tantalising similarity to the geometry of three-dimensional space

It’s incredibly tricky to pin down the origin of the language that led to the words spoken everywhere between Spain and India – and it’ll be even harder to be sure we’ve got it right

Unusual rocks on an Icelandic beach were dropped there by icebergs, adding to evidence that an unusually cool period preceded the collapse of the Roman Empire

In 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a report detailing recently-declassified information on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Since then, the Department of Defense has released annual reports on UAP through the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Nevertheless, there is still a lack of publicly available scientific data on the subject. To address this, a new study led by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the Galileo Project proposes an All-Sky Infrared Camera to search for potential indications of extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Readers and correspondents are asking me what i think about the just-revealed “de-extinction” of the dire wolf by Colossal Biosciences, and the firm’s attempt to bring back the woolly mammoth, too.  I don’t want to write much about this now because I’ve put up a few posts about the mammoth before, and Matthew has expressed similar sentiments in his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age.  Further, I am writing my take for another venue, so I will just say this about the genetics of the de-extinction efforts so far:

My general sentiments are these: attempts to bring back extinct species as outlined so far are not only scientifically misguided, but are journalistically mis-reported by the press.  That is, the press is, by and large, distorting what has been done scientifically, pretending that an animal with only a few cosmetic gene edits is actually identical to an extinct species. Further, Colossal seems happy enough to let this misconception be widely reported (to be fair, there are some decent articles about the science of de-extinction, and I’ll link to a few below).

The main problem, as I said, is the pretense that changing a living species by editing just a handful of genes (20 max so far) to get something that looks like the extinct “dire wolf” is not the same thing as re-creating a dire wolf.  That species undoubtedly had hundreds or thousands of genetic differences from the gray wolf, including genes affecting metabolism and behavior—genes that we do not know.  Further, control regions of genes, which are outside protein-coding regions, undoubtedly are involved in differences between extinct species and their relatives. But we don’t know where these regions are and so cannot use them for genetic editing.

All of this means that, in my view, de-extincting species is a cosmetic rather than a serious genetic project, designed to produce gee-whiz animals to entertain rich people and to wow children.  Such animals, especially the highly touted de-extincted mammoth, which mammoth expert Tori Herridge calls “an elephant in a fur coat”, would certainly not survive in their original habitat.  Further, proponents’ claims that de-extinction would be a fantastic conservation effort , and could even mitigate global warming. are totally unsupported speculations.

There are two such efforts that have received all the press: the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth and of the dire wolf; the latter effort has produced some pups, but they are not dire wolves. We will never see woolly mammoths, though Colossal promises that they’ll be stomping about in three years!

Mammoth (see my website posts above) There are many reasons why this project is a non-starter.  The evidence that it is feasible rests solely on the production of “woolly mice,” which are mice that have had 8 edits in only 7 genes (remember, mice are easier to work with than elephants!).  Only two of the genes that were changed were edited in a way to conform to known mammoth genes. The rest are simply using mouse mutants known to affect hair texture, color, and waviness in lab mice.  Thus we have a woolly mouse—not anything close to a woolly elephant. Yes, it’s cool to make multiple changes in multiple genes at once, but this is not a new technology. The novelty will be to edit an elephant egg cell in a way that the edited cell can be implanted in an Asian elephant and develop into a woolly mammoth. If you really want something popping out of an Asian elephant that is close to a woolly mammoth, you will never get it. In fact, the whole project seems impossible to me. And the conservation results touted by Colossal–that the re-exincted mammoths, released on the tundra, will keep carbon in the permafrost and not in the atmosphere–are purely speculative.

Dire wolf:  Scientists edited a gray wolf stem cell, changing 20 genes. Fifteen of the edited genes were designed from from the sequenced dire-wolf genome (again, sequencing an extinct organism is a feat, but not one developed by Colossal), while five others were taken from known genes that change dogs or wolves (the articles aren’t clear on which genes were used, as Colossal is keeping that secret).  The edited cell, as an egg, was placed into a “large dog” to be the surrogate mom, and then extracted via caesarian section (did the dogs survive this procedure?) They get a whitish wolf with some dog or gray-wolf genes, not dire wolf genes. All of the changes are said to affect things like fur color, body size, and tooth and jaw configuration–traits that differentiated the dire wolf from the gray wolf.  As I noted, we wind up with a gray wolf (and remember, domestic dogs are descended from gray wolves, and can even be considered gray wolves, as they mate with each other and can produce fertile hybrids); we get a gray wolf with a couple of changed traits to make it look like what we think the dire wolf looked like. (We are not sure, for example, that the dire wolf had white fur.)

Neither the mammoth nor the dire wolf results are published in a peer-reviewed journals, though the woolly mouse experiment has been languishing on bioRΧiv for a while but hasn’t been published.

Here are some links, most but not all of them pointing out problems with de-extinction projects:

Colossal’s explanation of  the mammoth project. (Note that they also want to de-extinct the dodo and the thylacine, or marsupial wolf.)

Colossal’s account on the dire wolf result.

Nature paper by Ewen Calloway on why the woolly mouse isn’t a credible step towards a woolly mammoth.

Nature paper by Tori Herridge explaining why she turned down a position as advisor to Colossal on the mammoth

Article in Ars Technica by Nitin Sekar, WWF authority on conserving the Asian elephant, explaining why “Mammoth de-extinction is bad conservation.”

Guardian paper by Adam Rutherford explaining why trying to de-extinct the Woolly Mammoth is not only unethical, but impossible.

NYT article by Carl Zimmer on the dire wolf, a good summary and not nearly as critical as his Bluesky post below.

New Yorker article by D. T. Max on the dire wolf, somewhat windy and credulous (archived here).

Article in the MIT Technology Review by Antonio Regalado: “Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire?”

Tweets and posts:

Tori Herridge’s posts on both Twitter and Bluesky are an informative and hilarious critique of the woolly mouse/mammoth projects. Get started with this one if you’d like (it’s a thread):

[though as an aside, honestly Colossal missed a trick not going for the Fgfr1/2 double mutant — I mean, have you seen a more mammothy-mouse?!]*MAMMOUSE KLAXON*www.nature.com/articles/s41…

— Tori Herridge (@toriherridge.bsky.social) 2025-03-05T00:20:55.808Z

Journalist Asher Elbein and a commenter on the misleading Dire Wolf.

Here Carl Zimmer points out that Colossal’s dire wolf is not a dire wolf. This is a bit more frank than his NYT article!

It's not a dire wolf. It's a gray wolf clone with 20 dire-wolf gene edits, and with some dire wolf traits. And here's my story! Gift link: http://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/s…

— Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer.com) 2025-04-07T16:38:15.772Z

Adam Rutherford (read his Guardian article on mammoths above) is particularly critical of the Dire Wolf project. I love the first tweet asserting that journalists who don’t do due diligence are making people stupider. That’s true, and it also makes people misunderstand (and possibly eventually mistrust) science:

Public service announcement. They are not Dire Wolves. They have 20 single letter changes in their entire genomes. I’ve done shits with more mutations. Every time journalists write up a Colossus press release, They are making people stupider. Client journalism by a ridiculous company.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T20:02:25.283Z

GODDAMIT. IT’S NOT A RESURRECTED DIRE WOLF. 20 edits in 19,000 genes. IT’S NOT GOING TO AID CONSERVATION. EVERY WRITE UP THAT SWALLOWS AND REGURGITATES THIS GUFFERY WOLFSHIT IS DOING PR FOR A FUNDING ROUND.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T12:05:49.778Z

Caveat emptor!

Oh, and for fun, here’s the Secretary of the Interior tweeting about how we shouldn’t worry so much about endangered species and pay more attention to “de-extincting” species.  But of course “de-extincting” isn’t going to do squat to keep existing species from waning. Burgum is off the rails here, entranced by the dire gray wolf.

Scientists have pioneered an influenza virus vector-based nasal spray vaccine platform and developed a nasal spray H5N1 avian influenza vaccine. During the early COVID-19 pandemic, this platform enabled the rapid development of a nasal spray vaccine in collaboration with mainland China's Wantai BioPharm. After completing Phase 1-3 clinical trials, it was approved in 2022 as the world's first nasal spray COVID-19 vaccine.

While the daily ebb and flow of people across a city might seem chaotic, new research reveals underlying universal patterns. A study unveils fundamental spatiotemporal scaling laws that govern these population dynamics.

Researchers have developed a handheld device that could potentially replace stethoscopes as a tool for detecting certain types of heart disease.

Every galaxy is thought to form at the center of a dark matter halo. Stars are formed when gravity within dark matter halos draws in gas, but astrophysicists don't know whether star-free dark matter halos exist. An Diego astrophysicist has calculated the mass below which halos fail to form.

A new way to watch catalytic reactions happen at the molecular level in real time could lead to better fundamental understanding and planning of the important reactions used in countless manufacturing processes every day.

A tiny, soft, flexible robot that can crawl through earthquake rubble to find trapped victims or travel inside the human body to deliver medicine may seem like science fiction, but an international team is pioneering such adaptable robots by integrating flexible electronics with magnetically controlled motion.

A tiny, soft, flexible robot that can crawl through earthquake rubble to find trapped victims or travel inside the human body to deliver medicine may seem like science fiction, but an international team is pioneering such adaptable robots by integrating flexible electronics with magnetically controlled motion.

Researchers have worked to optimize the use of coffee grounds in pour-over coffee. They recommend pouring from as high as possible while still maintaining the water's flow. In particular, the group found the thick water jets typical of standard gooseneck kettles are ideal for achieving this necessary height and laminar flow. Displaced grounds recirculate as the water digs deeper into the coffee bed, allowing for better mixing between the water and the grounds, and thus, results in a stronger coffee with fewer beans.

Physicists have determined that the ideal technique for pour-over coffee can use up to 10 per cent fewer beans to make a cup just as flavoursome

The number of dinosaurs may have been stable before the asteroid impact, despite evidence that species were getting less diverse

Magicians have long exploited quirks in our perception of the world to make us experience the impossible. Now, cognitive psychology is exploring how they do it and revealing fresh insights into how our minds work

Familiar Saturn currently provides dawn observers with a bizarre, ‘ring-less’ view.

Today we have a lovely batch of tidepool organisms taken by UC Davis math professor Abby Thompson, who is also a Hero of Intellectual Freedom.  Abby’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

More tidepool pictures from Dillon Beach, CA.   The best tidepooling season is just getting underway.  There are some big tides at the end of April, and they’ll recur through July, with the low tides at ghastly hours of the morning.    These pictures from March were from less painful times of day.   There are a few species I’ve posted before, but they had some especially photogenic representatives this month.

Several of these animals are really (really) tiny, and some are both tiny and fast, so some of the pictures aren’t perfect, but I think they’re interesting creatures.

Phidiana hiltoni (nudibranch).   Posted before, but this one was a beauty:

Genus Ophiopholis (brittle star). Distinguishing species in this genus requires better pictures than this one.  This tiny- about an inch tip to tip- brittle star was on the underside of a rock.    These move fast and gracefully.    They’re in the same phylum as big ochre stars, the sea urchins (see the next two pictures) and sea cucumbers:

Strongylocentrotus purpuratus (purple sea urchin). I know, it’s green, but the juveniles start green and then turn purple.    The next picture shows its mouth on the underside:

Sea urchin mouth:

Family Sabellidae (feather duster worm). Another very tiny creature, visible to the naked eye as just a slight pink fuzz.   This marine worm lives in a tube of its own creation,  and retracts into the tube in a flash if disturbed.  The dark dots at the base of the “feathers” are eyes:

Caesia fossata (eggs from this snail).

Margarites pupillus (tentative ID) I liked the bit of opalescence on the shell:

Coryphella trilineata (nudibranch). Another one I’ve posted before, posing for the camera:

Genus Gnathopleustes (amphipod). Yet another tiny guy.    I’ve found just a few of these, a speck of bright color in the seaweed:

Mopalia acuta (chiton).   The Mopalia species can be hard to distinguish from photos, so this ID should be taken with a grain of salt.    Chitons usually cling to a rock like a limpet, but they can curl into a ball like a roly-poly to protect their vulnerable body if they get dislodged:

Camera info:  Mostly Olympus TG-7, in microscope mode, pictures taken from above the water.

A moth antenna can be integrated into the electronics of a drone to create a smell-seeking bio-hybrid – but it only detects the smell of a female moth

This really is just a coincidence – I posted yesterday about using AI and modern genetic engineering technology, with one application being the de-extinction of species. I had not seen the news from yesterday about a company that just announced it has cloned three dire wolves from ancient DNA. This is all over the news, so here is a quick recap before we discuss the implications.

The company, Colossal Biosciences, has long announced its plans to de-extinct the woolly mammoth. This was the company that recently announced it had made a woolly mouse by inserting a gene for wooliness from recovered woolly mammoth DNA. This was a proof-of-concept demonstration. But now they say they have also been working on the dire wolf, a species of wolf closely related to the modern gray wolf that went extinct 13,000 years ago. We mostly know about them from skeletons found in the Le Brea tar pits (some of which are on display at my local Peabody Museum). Dire wolves are about 20% bigger than gray wolves, have thicker lighter coats, and are more muscular. They are the bad-ass ice-age version of wolves that coexisted with saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths.

The company was able to recover DNA from 13,000 year old tooth and a 72,000 year old skull. With that DNA they engineered wolf DNA at 20 sites over 14 genes, then used that DNA to fertilize an egg which they gestated in a dog. They actually did this twice, the first time creating two males, Romulus and Remus (now six months old), and the second time making one female, Kaleesi (now three months old). The wolves are kept in a reserve. The company says they have no current plan to breed them, but do plan to make more in order to create a full pack to study pack behavior.

The company acknowledges these puppies are not the exact dire wolves that were alive up to 13,000 years ago, but they are pretty close. They started pretty close – gray wolves share 99.5% of their DNA with dire wolves, and now they are even closer, replicating the key morphological features of the dire wolf. So not a perfect de-extinction, but pretty close. Next up is the woolly mammoth. They also plan to use the same techniques to de-extinct the dodo and the thylacine.

What is the end-game of de-extincting these species? That’s a great question. I don’t anticipate that a breeding population of dire wolves will be released into the wild. While they did coexist with grey wolves, and can again, this species was not driven to extinction by humans but likely by changing environmental conditions. They are no longer adapted to this world, and would likely be a highly disruptive invasive species. The same is true of the woolly mammoth, although it is not a predator so the concerns are no as – dire (sorry, couldn’t resist). But still, we would need to evaluate their effect on any ecosystem we place them.

The same is not true for the thylacine or dodo. The dodo in particular seem benign enough to reintroduce. The challenge will be getting it to survive. It went extinct not just from human predation, but also it ground nests and was not prepared for the rats and other predators that we introduced to their island. So first we would need to return their habitat to a livable state for them. Thylacines might be the easiest to reintroduce, as they went extinct very recently and their habitat still largely exists.

So – for those species we have no intention of reintroducing into the wild, or for which this would be an extreme challenge – what do we do with them? We could keep them on a large preserve to study them and to be viewed by tourists. Here we might want to follow the model of Zealandia – a wildlife sanctuary in New Zealand. I visited Zealandia and it is amazing. It is a 500+ acre ecosanctuary, completely walled off from the outside. The goal is to recreate the native plants and animals of pre-human New Zealand, and to keep out all introduced predators. It serves as a research facility, sanctuary for endangered species, and tourist and educational site.

I could imagine other similar ecosanctuaries. The island of Mauritius where the dodo once lived is now populated, but vast parts of it are wild. It might be feasible to create an ecosanctuary there, safe for the dodo. We could do a similar project in North America, which is not only a preserve for some modern species but also could contain de-extincted compatible species. Having large and fully protected ecosanctuaries is not a bad idea in itself.

There is a fine line between an ecosanctuary and a Jurassic Park. It really is a matter of how the park is managed and how people interact with it, and it’s more of a continuum than a sharp demarcation. It really isn’t a bad idea to take an otherwise barren island, perhaps a recent volcanic island where life has not been established yet, and turn it into an isolated ecosanctuary, then fill it with a bunch of ancient plants and animals. This would be an amazing research opportunity, a way to preserve biodiversity, and an awesome tourist experience, which then could fund a lot of research and environmental initiatives.

I think the bottom line is that de-extinction projects can work out well, if they are managed properly. The question is – do we have faith that they will be? The chance that they are is increased if we engage in discussions now, including some thoughtful regulations to ensure ethical and responsible behavior all around.

 

The post De-extincting the Dire Wolf first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.