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Sweden's radioactive nuclear waste will be stored in a sealed bedrock repository for 100,000 years. It will be hazardous for a very long time. So how can we ensure that humanity does not forget that it is there? Researchers have come up with a proposal for how to keep the memory alive over generations.

Despite the popularity of augmented reality, AR wearable technologies haven't gained traction due to the weight and bulk associated with batteries and electronic components, and the suboptimal computational power, battery life and brightness of the devices. A team of researchers recently improved the practicality of light-receiving AR glasses by increasing the angle of incidence light capable of producing an adequate projected AR image from five degrees to roughly 20-30 degrees.

The enormous computing resources needed to train neural networks for artificial intelligence (AI) result in massive power consumption. Researchers have developed a method that is 100 times faster and therefore much more energy efficient. Instead of taking an iterative approach, the parameters are computed directly based on probabilities. The results so far are comparable in quality to existing iterative methods.

The enormous computing resources needed to train neural networks for artificial intelligence (AI) result in massive power consumption. Researchers have developed a method that is 100 times faster and therefore much more energy efficient. Instead of taking an iterative approach, the parameters are computed directly based on probabilities. The results so far are comparable in quality to existing iterative methods.

Energy remains a significant factor in industrial production processes. High levels of energy consumption make production more expensive and exacerbate the climate crisis. A new type of robot technology needs 90% less electricity than conventional systems. The technology uses lightweight, shape memory materials to construct novel, non-pneumatic, industrial gripper systems that function without the need for additional sensors.

Energy remains a significant factor in industrial production processes. High levels of energy consumption make production more expensive and exacerbate the climate crisis. A new type of robot technology needs 90% less electricity than conventional systems. The technology uses lightweight, shape memory materials to construct novel, non-pneumatic, industrial gripper systems that function without the need for additional sensors.

A type of Artificial Intelligence that mimics the functioning of the human brain could represent a powerful solution in automatically detecting wildfires, plummeting the time needed to mitigate their devastating effects, a new study finds.

Cancer treatment has advanced significantly, focusing on targeted approaches that destroy tumor cells while sparing healthy tissue. Researchers have developed magnetic nanoparticles that can be directed to tumors using a magnet and then heated with a laser to destroy cancer cells. In mouse models, this targeted technique successfully eliminated tumors entirely. This innovative method provides a more precise and less toxic alternative to traditional treatments, paving the way for more effective cancer therapies.

Researchers have developed the Automatic Process Explorer (APE), an approach that enhances our understanding of atomic and molecular processes. By dynamically refining simulations, APE has uncovered unexpected complexities in the oxidation of Palladium (Pd) surfaces, offering new insights into catalyst behavior.

Urban highways promise to get people to their destinations faster -- and bring them together. But at the same time, they reduce social connections between people within the city, especially at distances of less than 5 km, according to a new study.

A new study revealed that atmospheric gravity waves play a crucial role in driving latitudinal air currents on Mars, particularly at high altitudes. The findings, based on long-term atmospheric data, offer a fresh perspective on the behaviors of Mars' middle atmosphere, highlighting fundamental differences from Earth's. The study applied methods developed to explore Earth's atmosphere to quantitatively estimate the influence of gravity waves on Mars' planetary circulation.

Researchers have created washable and durable magnetic field sensing electronic textiles -- thought to be the first of their kind -- which they say paves the way to transform use in clothing. This technology will allow users to interact with everyday textiles or specialized clothing by simply pointing their finger above a sensor.

Researchers have created washable and durable magnetic field sensing electronic textiles -- thought to be the first of their kind -- which they say paves the way to transform use in clothing. This technology will allow users to interact with everyday textiles or specialized clothing by simply pointing their finger above a sensor.

The mystery of Dark Matter endures. Despite sixty years of observation and research, scientists still haven't isolated the particle that accounts for roughly 85% of the Universe's mass. However, ongoing experiments and studies have provided insight into how this mysterious mass works. For instance, a research team led by a member of the Tokyo Metropolitan University relied on a new technique that has set new limits on the lifetime of Dark Matter (DM), bringing scientists a step closer to resolving this cosmological mystery.

Scientists have developed a biorobotic arm that can mirror human tremors, such as those experienced by individuals that live with Parkinson's disease. Artificial muscles on either side of the forearm contract and relax to suppress the involuntary shaking of the wrist and hand. The researchers see their biorobotic arm not only as a platform for other scientists in the field to test new ideas in exoskeleton technology. The arm also serves as a test bed to see how well artificial muscles known as HASELs can one day become the building blocks of wearable devices. The vision is to one day develop a sleeve that tremor patients can comfortably wear to be able to better cope with everyday tasks such as holding a cup.

Scientists have developed a biorobotic arm that can mirror human tremors, such as those experienced by individuals that live with Parkinson's disease. Artificial muscles on either side of the forearm contract and relax to suppress the involuntary shaking of the wrist and hand. The researchers see their biorobotic arm not only as a platform for other scientists in the field to test new ideas in exoskeleton technology. The arm also serves as a test bed to see how well artificial muscles known as HASELs can one day become the building blocks of wearable devices. The vision is to one day develop a sleeve that tremor patients can comfortably wear to be able to better cope with everyday tasks such as holding a cup.

THIS ARTICLE IS DEDICATED TO MY COLLEAGUE MATTHEW COBB, WHO IS BEING DRIVEN CRAZY BY UNHINGED PIECES ON “DE-EXTINCTING” THE WOOLY MAMMOTH

The push to re-create the extinct Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) may be the biggest waste of money in decades, and for several reasons. First, the people behind this are misleading the public by making us think that they’re going to give us a real woolly mammoth instead of a hairy and (perhaps) cold-tolerant Asiatic elephant, which is what they’re really trying to make. It doesn’t help that credulous and ignorant journalists can’t even see through this.

Second, the endeavor to even make a hairy elephant (they propose to put manufactured mammoth genes with sequences derived from frozen mammoths, into a fertilized elephant egg, and then implant it into an
Asiatic elephant), faces so many obstacles that it seems nearly impossible. And even if it were possible, you’d need to make at least two faux mammoths so they could create a lineage. And where would they live, since real woolly mammoths were denizens of the chilly tundras of northern Asia? (That’s why they had hair.) What would they eat? Asiatic elephants don’t eat the kind of stuff on the tundra, and aren’t equipped to process it, but they’re not going to change behavior and physiology genes.

As I reported yesterday, this ridiculous project is making the news again because, yes, scientists have created a “woolly mouse” by injecting nine genes known to influence hair color and texture IN MICE into mouse stem cells and implanting the lot in mice. They got fuzzier mice, but apparently not the ones shown below, which are in the press release. What they really got are mice less hairier than those shown in the press (see below).

Of course, you can also breed mice that look like this, but we can’t breed Asiatic elephants, though that would be more likely to produce a faux mammoth, because their generation time is too long.  And, as I said, it’s a hell of a lot easier to make transgenic mice than transgenic elephants.  As one wag tweeted about this ludicrous experiment on mice, which is supposed to be a precursor to the Mammoth Project:

GIVE THEM TRUNKS YOU COWARDSwww.theguardian.com/science/2025…

— Marc Dionne (@marcsdionne.bsky.social) 2025-03-04T18:05:25.420Z

. . . AND BIG TUSKS, TOO!

Both Matthew and I have criticized this project for its pretended aims as well as its impossibility (see my posts here, as especially this one), and Matthew is getting depressed at how many journalists have been taken in by the project, now in the hands of Colossal Biosciences (a “de-extinction” company), but most famously promoted by Harvard’s George Church, the founder of Colossal (curiously, Elon Musk had a hand in convincing Church to take this on). In fact, Matthew devotes a big section of his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age, to debunking the Mammoth Project.

Now Scientific American, which I hoped would recover from its years of benighted wokeness, has taken up the story. (Click below to read, or find it archived here.)

How did the magazine do? (The author is journalist Adam Popescu and the editor is Andrea Thompson, “covering the environment, energy and earth sciences”.) Well, on first reading I’d give it a C. It does point out some problems to worry about after we produce a woolly mammoth, but is quite thin about whether they can get one in the first place.  For example, it doesn’t even note that an Asian elephant with a few genes that make it hairy and (perhaps) cold-tolerant is nothing like a Woolly Mammoth, separated by about 6.5 million years of evolution. (That’s about the time separating us from chimps and bonobos.) It is a hairy elephant with no behaviors that would help it survive on the tundra.  And they don’t even mention the problems of implanted a genetically altered elephant embryo back into a female Asiatic elephant. Here’s what I wrote in one post (the quote within is from the NYT):

Further, a lot of other genes differ between a mammoth and an Asian elephant. What guarantee is there that the inserted mammoth genes would be expressed correctly, or even work at all in concert with the Asian elephant developmental system?

But it gets worse. Since you can’t implant a transgenic embryo into an elephant mom (we don’t know how to do that, and we would get just one or two chances), Church had this bright idea:

Initially, Dr. Church envisioned implanting embryos into surrogate female elephants. But he eventually soured on the idea. Even if he could figure out in vitro fertilization for elephants — which no one has done before — building a herd would be impractical, since he would need so many surrogates.

Instead, Dr. Church decided to make an artificial mammoth uterus lined with uterine tissue grown from stem cells. “I’m not making a bold prediction this is going to be easy,” he said. “But everything up to this point has been relatively easy. Every tissue we’ve gone after, we’ve been able to get a recipe for.”

The idea has a few precedents. At the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, researchers have developed a sealed bag that can support a fetal lamb for four weeks, for example. But Colossal will need to build an artificial uterus big enough to house a fetus for around two years, reaching a weight of 200 pounds.

An artificial mammoth uterus? Seriously? If you think that’s gonna work, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you. Of course, if you’re going to breed these things, you’d have to make two of them of opposite sexes. Could they even do that?

That, in fact, is another huge problem beyond problem beyond the pretense that they are going to put a lot of mammoth-derived or mammoth-mimicking genes in an elephant and call it a Woolly Mammoth. An artificial womb for a baby elephant would be the size of a Volkswagen!  Scientific American doesn’t mention that problem, either.

Finally, the Colossal researchers apparently also inserted a gene thought to affect mouse lipid metabolism into the mouse (Nature, in the article below, doesn’t mention it), but the Sci. Am. article says in the second paragraph that the Woolly Mice have “cold adapted traits such as the way in which it sotres and burns fat”.  That is a lie. They don’t know whether the gene does that in the mice, and later on Sci. Am. gives the real story:

The team also targeted lipid metabolism, “which is the process by which the body breaks down, synthesizes and stores fats,” Shapiro says. The paper notes that “future experiments will examine the effect of high fat diets and temperature preferences” on the mice to inform further work toward the goal of developing cold-adapted elephant-mammoth hybrids.

So no, the mice are not cold adapted. (See below, too.)

The problems that Sci Am does mention involve mostly things about about the environment and conservation, perhaps prompted by the editor. And they are real problems, but won’t even need to be considered until we get one of these mammoths (the NBC Evening News on Tuesday said that Colossal envisions the Mammoth Release in 2028, which is pure bunk). Below are problems Sci. Am. lists, but they’re all problems that would arise if they created the faux mammoth and then put it into the wild. These are quotes:

But many experts in genetic engineering and conservation are skeptical. Rewilding is risky; species such as wolves and elephants have come into conflict with humans, and others have fallen victim to predators and poachers. No one knows what would happen if a mammoth—or, more technically, an elephant-mammoth hybrid—was released: What would it eat? How would we protect it? Could it reproduce?

. . . . As for saving the climate, “we’re looking at a warming world, and [Colossal’s researchers] want to bring back creatures that are adapted to the cold?” says Elsa Panciroli, a paleontologist at National Museums Scotland, who studies ancient mice-sized mammals. “I study animals from the past, and they should stay in the past. Lack of habitat, human conflict, agriculture, climate change—the idea that they can fix that with gene editing is missing the big picture.”

. . . “In certain ancient species’ DNA, you don’t know what the function of this DNA is, so there are more than ethical problems; there are biological hazards from moving and editing the DNA,” says Yale University geneticist Jiangbing. Zhou “I’m not sure about the potential risks of this type of work, as the function of ancient DNA in live mice may be difficult to predict.”

. . . What happens with the mice or—if the company ever realizes its ultimate ambition—the woolly mammoths is another ethical quandary. “I feel like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, but if we’re going to interfere with nature, there has to be good reason,” Panciroli says. Additionally, reintroduced animals (including elephants) are routinely targeted by poachers, points out Andrea Crosta, founder of a wildlife-crime-fighting nongovernment organization called Earth League International.

. . .“It’s arrogance,” says Sue Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, who spent decades fighting whaling and the ivory trade. “I’m not against technology. I’m not saying nature’s perfect. But this is such a waste of money when conservation is dying for lack of funds. To make some strange animal we can gawk at—we should be past that.”

Trailblazing biologist George Schaller agrees. “We need to protect what we have,” he says.

I think I’ll downgrade the grade I give to Sci. Am. to a D, for they completely omit the problems of making anything that resembles a Woolly Mammoth, and then point out problems that would arise if we could and then unleashed them on the tundra. They should have mentioned, as Nature implies below, that the whole project is simply bonkers and will not succeed. (If they do, I’ll eat my hat.) And Sci Am show pictures of hairy mice which are NOT the mice created by Colossal (see below).  Showing those photos borders on duplicity!

Nature, as you can tell by the headline below, does a much better job of pointing out the problems, though it doesn’t mention the Uterus Difficulty or the Behavior and Foraging Difficulty. I give the article an A-, though, because it does say that Colossal isn’t going to produce a woolly mammoth. Click to read:

They point out the main problem in the third through fifth paragraphs:

Colossal, which is based in Dallas, Texas, and is worth more than US$10 billion according to its latest valuation, says the woolly mouse represents an important step towards its goal of engineering Asian elephants — the mammoth’s closest living relative — with genetic changes for key mammoth traits. “The Colossal Woolly Mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission,” said Ben Lamm, Colossal’s co-founder and chief executive, in the press release.

But some experts in mammoth genetics and genome editing question whether the mice represent a significant advance in either area, let alone a milestone on the way to bringing back woolly mammoths, which last roamed Earth some 4,000 years ago.

“It’s far away from making a mammoth or a ‘mammoth mouse’,” says Stephan Riesenberg, a genome engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “It’s just a mouse that has some special genes.”

And note that Colossal created some of their fuzzy mice by inserting into the mice genome not genes derived from mammoth sequences, but mouse mutations already known to make mice hairier. It’s a scam!

Shapiro [from Colossal] defends the decision to include mouse-specific mutations in Colossal’s woolly mice, in part because of the genetic chasm that separates mice and mammoths. “We have to choose modifications that are going to be compatible with healthy animals,” Shapiro says. “We’re not shoving mammoth genes into mice because there’s 200 million years of evolutionary distance between them.”

It’s not clear how many genetic changes would be needed to imbue elephants with mammoth traits. Lamm says Colossal’s goal isn’t to create an exact replica of mammoths, but a creature that can fill the ecological niches that mammoths occupied. “It’s really about rebuilding extinct species for today and looking for lost biodiversity and lost genes that drive those phenotypes.”

Making eight changes to an organism’s genome, as the Colossal team did, is now fairly standard in genetic engineering, Riesenberg says.

Riesenberg and his colleagues are developing methods to introduce dozens, or even hundreds, of Neanderthal-specific changes into human stem cells — to identify the biology that makes humans unique (“One cannot and should not recreate the Neanderthal,” he stresses). Altering an animal’s genome on this scale is one of the great frontiers in genome editing, Riesenberg adds. Even the capacity to make this many changes “would not bring you close to making a mammoth”.

Clearly Nature isn’t enthusiastic about this project, and they shouldn’t be. Even the woolly mice they show are not from their study (see below), but that took another scientist to point that out.

As Dr. Victoria Herridge points out below, they didn’t get the hairy mice shown in the journalism (and press-release) photos by combining the genes they said they inserted into the mouse. Instead, they appear to have inserted other genes already known to cause hairiness in mice, for because people have been breeding hairy “fancy mice” for years. The “mammothiest mouse” produced by Colossal is not the one shown in the pictures.

And so we have the BlueSky threads below from Dr. Victoria Herridge at the University of Sheffield, a paleontologist who studies real mammoths.  She simply takes the Colossal report apart, noting that the hairy mouse pictures used in Sci Am. do not show show the result of combined gene insertions used by the researchers, but some other mutations. Further, she notes that there’s no known effect of the “fat metabolism” genes on fat metabolism of the transgenic mice.  As Matthew adds, “note that the key experiment changing fat metabolism genes HAD NO EFFECT though they said little about that in the paper and the journalists all skipped over it…”

Here’s the hairiest mice that the Colossal people really produced by multiple insertions. They aren’t the ones in the picture above; they’re much more clean-cut! Note her comment on the inefficacy of the fat-metabolism gene.

 

Here Tori shows that Colossal should have used other mouse mutants to confect the mammoth story. Look at the double mutant Fgfr1/2!!!!

Finally, she tried to track down where the mice in all the magazines and the press release came from (the original BioRχiv paper is here).   These mice are in the supplementary materials in the article’s preprint, but involve fewer mutations than the ones touted as “mammothyt mice”:

I asked Matthew if he had ever seen any article in the popular press (beyond what’s in his book) that provided an accurate critical analysis of the Mammoth Project. He said, “no”.  As the warden said in the movie Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Science journalism is, by and large, abysmal, though of course there are exceptions.

Finally, some humor from Dr. Cobb, who’s been beleaguered by science journalists about this for years, and always tells them that the project is dumb:

He’s dreaming of eating those damned woolly mice.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-03-04T20:25:24.966Z

Skeptics love to bring up one particular topic regarding long-term human space exploration - radiation. So far, all of the research completed on it has been relatively limited and has shown nothing but harmful effects. Long-term exposure has been linked to an increase in cancer, cataracts, or even, in some extreme cases, acute radiation poisoning, an immediate life-threatening condition. NASA is aware of the problem and recently supported a new post-doc from MIT named Robert Hinshaw via the Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. Dr. HHinshaw'sjob over the next year will be to study the effectiveness of an extreme type of mitochondria replacement therapy to treat the long- and short-term risks of radiation exposure in space.

Coots' nests in Amsterdam are built using discarded plastic, providing a time capsule into the material's use over the past few decades

We are running out of photos from different readers, but fortunately we have several remaining installments from Robert Lang‘s trip to Brazil’s Pantanal, one of which I’ll present today. But please send in your photos!

Robert’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

Readers’ Wildlife Photos: The Pantanal, Part VIII: Birds

Continuing our mid-2025 journey to the Pantanal in Brazil, by far the largest category of observation and photography was birds: we saw over 100 different species of birds (and this was not even a birding-specific trip, though the outfitter also organizes those for the truly hard core). Here we continue working our way through the alphabetarium of common names.

Laughing falcon (Herpetotheres cachinnans):

Lesser yellow-headed vulture (Cathartes burrovianus). One of the several vultures we saw (which included the spectacular king vulture (Sarcoramphus papa), but alas, that one only at a great distance.):

Monk parakeet (Myiopsitta monachus):

Monk parakeets live in communal nests that they keep adding to, eventually resulting in gigantic snarls of branches with openings all over that are a constant hum of activity. Here’s a close-up of one, showing some of the individual nest openings within the apartment block:

Muscovy duck (Cairina moschata):

Nanday parakeet (Aratinga nenday):

And a pair of Nanday parakeets:

Orange-backed troupial (Icterus croconotus):

Peach-fronted parakeets (Eupsittula aurea). These tiny, wide-eyed birds look like play toys:

Plumbeous ibis (Theristicus caerulescens):

More birds to come.