We already have enough hoaxes without fake animals roaming the earth, no?

Greek Reporter:

Jurassic Park has nothing on three scientists who have decided to reassemble genes from woolly mammoths and resurrect them once again after having been extinct for more than ten thousand years.

What could go wrong, you may well ask, since the Jurassic Park thing turned out so well?

We may soon find out, as $15 million has already been pledged to the effort to bring this species back from extinction with the help of gene editing.

After the passage of ten millennia, scientists have created a start-up, dubbed named “Colossal,” which announced on Tuesday that funding has now been secured that may result in thousands of woolly mammoths roaming the vast plains and steppes of Siberia.

George Church, a geneticist at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told interviewers from the New York Times that “This is a major milestone for us. It’s going to make all the difference in the world.”

Long the domain of theoretical scientists who could only postulate how something like this may be possible, this gargantuan experiment may now become a reality as Colossal has taken many of the necessary primary steps needed that would result in a resurrection of the beloved extinct mammal using the gene-editing technology called CRISPR.

Since woolly mammoths and Asian elephants, which of course still exist in the wild, although they are threatened, share a common ancestor which lived six million years ago, Church says he believes that he could rewrite the elephants’ DNA to produce an animal which is for all intents and purposes a mammoth using CRISPR.

This genetic technology is a type copy-and-paste tool for the genetic code of all living things.

“A cold-resistant elephant”Church told The Guardian that “our goal is to make a cold-resistant elephant, but it is going to look and behave like a mammoth.”

“Not because we are trying to trick anybody, but because we want something that is functionally equivalent to the mammoth, that will enjoy its time at -40 Celsius,” he elaborated.

Church and his team compared the genomes from surviving fragments of DNA from woolly mammoths to those of modern elephants and quickly noted the major differences. After simply altering certain genes to produce denser hair and a thicker layer of fat, they hope to create an animal with characteristics that are sufficiently mammoth-like.

First, he says, they must create an artificial mammoth uterus which is already lined with stem-cell-derived tissue in order to nourish the mammoth fetus. They state that they are optimistic they will be able to produce an elephant-mammoth hybrid animal within the next few years.

Within the next decade, they hope to be able to create an animal that is entirely a wooly mammoth genetically.

Questioning the ramificationsAnyone who has read or even seen the movie Jurassic Park, however, will quickly ask why this should be done and what the eventual ramifications would be. Surely, living beings are almost impossible to control in certain situations, and the effect on the environment is likely to be a major one.

Scientists at Colossal maintain that their project is not just a scientific tour de force; the reintroduction of woolly mammoths might even benefit the arctic environment by reducing moss and increasing grassland there, according to a report from The New York Times.

Those opposed to the idea reply that there surely are different ways of tackling that issue other than reconstituting gigantic grassland behemoths which require enormous amounts of fodder.

Love Dalén, a paleogeneticist at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, Sweden, told CNN “there’s absolutely nothing that says that putting mammoths out there will have any, any effect on climate change whatsoever.”

I don’t really understand how this would change the weather. I would think they would say it would make the weather hotter because of the farts.

Based on their theories, what would actually change the weather are trees. Most of the greenhouse gasses are water vapor, and you couldn’t get rid of that without draining the oceans. Carbon dioxide is a small fraction of green house gas, and manmade carbon is a fraction of that fraction. So it’s a really moronic conversation.

Frankly, people should just be able to look at this one graphic:

Then fact-check it. Then just stop talking about the issue completely, because it is so obviously a complete hoax.

Instead people look at this graph, which is really just an absolute hoax (if water vapor was included, it would be 20 times bigger than CO2):

And then go around spreading moronic lies.

But yeah, you could probably use trees to remove the amount of carbon that is added by humans.

This has all the makings of a really funny horror movie where lots of people get squished and squashed in hilariously painful ways.

Let’s hope I’m right.

The Guardian:

Ten thousand years after woolly mammoths vanished from the face of the Earth, scientists are embarking on an ambitious project to bring the beasts back to the Arctic tundra.

The prospect of recreating mammoths and returning them to the wild has been discussed – seriously at times – for more than a decade, but on Monday researchers announced fresh funding they believe could make their dream a reality.

The boost comes in the form of $15m (£11m) raised by the bioscience and genetics company Colossal, co-founded by Ben Lamm, a tech and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has pioneered new approaches to gene editing.

The two guys who co-founded the company

The scientists have set their initial sights on creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid by making embryos in the laboratory that carry mammoth DNA. The starting point for the project involves taking skin cells from Asian elephants, which are threatened with extinction, and reprogramming them into more versatile stem cells that carry mammoth DNA. The particular genes that are responsible for mammoth hair, insulating fat layers and other cold climate adaptions are identified by comparing mammoth genomes extracted from animals recovered from the permafrost with those from the related Asian elephants.

These embryos would then be carried to term in a surrogate mother or potentially in an artificial womb. If all goes to plan – and the hurdles are far from trivial – the researchers hope to have their first set of calves in six years.

“Our goal is to make a cold-resistant elephant, but it is going to look and behave like a mammoth. Not because we are trying to trick anybody, but because we want something that is functionally equivalent to the mammoth, that will enjoy its time at -40C, and do all the things that elephants and mammoths do, in particular knocking down trees,” Church told the Guardian.

The project is framed as an effort to help conserve Asian elephants by equipping them with traits that allow them to thrive in vast stretches of the Arctic known as the mammoth steppe. But the scientists also believe introducing herds of elephant-mammoth hybrids to the Arctic tundra may help restore the degraded habitat and combat some of the impacts of the climate crisis. For example, by knocking down trees, the beasts might help to restore the former Arctic grasslands.

Not all scientists suspect that creating mammoth-like animals in the lab is the most effective way to restore the tundra. “My personal thinking is that the justifications given – the idea that you could geoengineer the Arctic environment using a herd of mammoths – isn’t plausible,” said Dr Victoria Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum.

“The scale at which you’d have to do this experiment is enormous. You are talking about hundreds of thousands of mammoths which each take 22 months to gestate and 30 years to grow to maturity.”

This all seems totally reasonable and like a good expenditure of funds.

This is a much more normal society than what we have now