Scientists Recover Wooly Mammoth Blood 190
westtxfun writes
"'Russian scientists claimed Wednesday they have discovered blood in the carcass of a woolly mammoth, adding that the rare find could boost their chances of cloning the prehistoric animal.' As scientists unearthed the recent find, very dark blood flowed out from beneath the mammoth, and the muscle tissue was red. This is the best-preserved specimen found so far and they are hopeful they can recover DNA and clone a mammoth. Semyon Grigoriev, one of the researchers, said, 'The approximate age of this animal is about 10,000 years old. It has been preserved thanks to the special conditions, due to the fact that it did not defrost and then freeze again. We suppose that the mammoth fell into water or got bogged down in a swamp, could not free herself and died. Due to this fact the lower part of the body, including the lower jaw, and tongue tissue, was preserved very well. The upper torso and two legs, which were in the soil, were gnawed by prehistoric and modern predators and almost did not survive.'"
Re:Hunting for science! (Score:4, Informative)
Addendum: Whoops, it's GoDaddy founder and former CEO Bob Parsons who hunts elephants for fun.
Re:Photo Op (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Photo Op (Score:3, Informative)
Eating meat nearly raw is mostly an American custom (ok, and some aboriginal groups').
Bullshit.
Citation: Sushi, Sashimi, Carpaccio, Tartare, etc.
The only raw meat eaten in the US comes from dishes which are popular in other countries, it's not our custom.
As for the beer, we drink it cold because refrigeration became commonplace for even the poorest families over here. Back in Europe refrigeration is much less common and wasn't adopted as early or as widely, so people are still used to drinking piss-warm beer.
Re:Half life of DNA is 521 years... (Score:5, Informative)
The kind that can do math? From that very article:
The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of 5 C, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.
“This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect,” says Simon Ho, a computational evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. However, although 6.8 million years is nowhere near the age of a dinosaur bone — which would be at least 65 million years old — “We might be able to break the record for the oldest authentic DNA sequence, which currently stands at about half a million years,” says Ho.
Emphasis mine.
So 10K years -- enough material and it should certainly be possible.
Re:Half life of DNA is 521 years... (Score:5, Informative)
The half life of all DNA is 521 years.
Did you even READ that article?
"After cell death, enzymes start to break down the bonds between the nucleotides that form the backbone of DNA, and micro-organisms speed the decay. In the long run, however, reactions with water are thought to be responsible for most bond degradation. Groundwater is almost ubiquitous, so DNA in buried bone samples should, in theory, degrade at a set rate."
So, that 'half life' is for buried bones in fairly specific situations. It doesn't apply everywhere.
Best part of all, is that story you linked to has its own related stories, and the first link is another story where they recovered DNA from 19,000 year old eggshells.
The second link is a story about sequencing the DNA from 100,000+ year old polar bears. Where the 'cold DRY' environment allows DNA to be preserved.
Re:Photo Op (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Photo Op (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, I think we realize that. What we also realize is that if we serve undercooked meat to our customers and they happen to get sick from that or anything else, they will sue us and win. Better to be safe than sorry, even if it destroys the taste. This is why we can't have nice things.