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.'"
Eat it, Charlie Sheen (Score:5, Funny)
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Can't wait for my mammoth burger and steak.
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Funny, it tastes an awful lot like a normal free range elephant.
Re:Eat it, Charlie Sheen (Score:5, Funny)
I know it's wrong, but personally I like elephant veal. Yeah, I know. Some AC is going to point out that technically veal has to be made out of cows. But you know what I mean. There isn't an English word for "elephant veal."
Re:Eat it, Charlie Sheen (Score:5, Funny)
velephant.
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The cloned Wooly Mammoth, however, won't be raised for meat, they will be herded for their wool. And the annual spring wool clip will be a real sonuvabitch!
and then a wooly mammoth mosquito came along (Score:2)
and now they're just cloning 2300 pound mosquitoes with ten-foot tusks. terrific. first solid food for our Minnesota mosquitoes.
Photo Op (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Photo Op (Score:5, Funny)
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maybe not among those aboriginal groups
So all those tusk-pierced noses are essentially a display of their natural humility?
Re:Photo Op (Score:5, Insightful)
A custom that is dying a bit on account of the advent better small, local, and craft beers. Now if the smaller breweries can only avoid fratricide [westsixth.com]. But, seriously, would you want to drink American mega-brews at a temperature you could taste them?
Carpaccio, mett, kifto, sakuraniku (or any sashimi like basashi with meat), and dare I look at Wikipedia to find more? In any case, I wouldn't suggest destroying the flavor of this carefully aged meat with the application of heat. Besides, think of all the jokes a person could make with this coming from a steppe country. Mammoth tartare, etc... actually, there's no etc. That's all I've got. And given that preparation isn't actually mongol, meh.
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Ive also heard of this thing called "sushi", and "sashimi".
Re:Photo Op (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't let facts get in the way of a pretentious rant.
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would you want to drink American mega-brews at a temperature you could taste them?
What, and find out that all it is is piss water in a can?
In any case, I wouldn't suggest destroying the flavor of this carefully aged meat with the application of heat.
I would, however, weigh that with the effects of not destroying the prehistoric microbes that might be crawling all over these meats, and that we probably have no antibodies for.
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I think he's making an oblique reference to the Tartar/Tatar peoples and how they live on the steppe.
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And how they prepared and ate their (usually horse) meat. Put under the saddle for a days ride to tenderize then eat raw.
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I've drunk plenty of Black-Rock-desert-in-August temperature beer and I think this heat argument holds no water; the freezing is just to make shit beer less noticeable.
I should also mention that generally speaking Australians are just as bad as Americans in this regard, and our popular beers are shit too.
Re:Photo Op (Score:4, Informative)
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Though at the local resteraunt, they will ask you how you want the kitfo cooked :) I have never ordered it cooked but, they do offer.
I find it interesting that dishes with actual raw beef taste a bit different than rare meat, I have eaten some pretty thick steaks that were undercooked for medium rare, more towards rare, and they still don't quite have the same flavor as dishes with raw meat.
Raw is not my favorite way to have beef (it is my favorite for salmon and some other fish) but, its a nice for a chang
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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.
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Re:Photo Op (Score:5, Insightful)
What the fuck? Stop making rules for drinking beer... or anything else for that matter. It tastes best however the fuck I want to drink it. My aunt drinks hot tap water. Fucking weird shit, but I'm not pretentious enough to tell her how she's "doing it wrong"
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Copper is an essential nutrient.
Yeah, kills off those zebra mussels growing in your throat...
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It's the lead in the solder that is leached and not so good.
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True, but when the advice not to drink from the hot water tap started lead solder was common.
Now there is perhaps the chance of hot water leaching something from the plastic pipes.
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Also depending on how your hot water system operates it may have been sitting in a tank for a few days. If you've got an old indirect gravity fed system then there's probably a header tank in the loft that is possibly open topped and can have all sorts of gunk floating around in it.
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Above room temperature? Seriously? What temperature is your room? I can't stand drinking ANYTHING, be it beer or otherwise that is at or above room temperature unless it is intended to be served well above the temperature of any room that I have ever been in .
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I believe the French invented "steak tartare" and still enjoy it to this day.
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Eating meat nearly raw is mostly an American custom (ok, and some aboriginal groups'). So is drinking beer so cold you can't feel any taste.
Actually what you call rare in the US, is called well done in continental Europe.
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Yeah I was pretty shocked in France to order my "bifteck bien cuit" and still have blood pour into my frites when i cut into it.
Now I've grown up I really want to go back :)
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Eating meat nearly raw is mostly an American custom (ok, and some aboriginal groups'). So is drinking beer so cold you can't feel any taste.
Actually what you call rare in the US, is called well done in continental Europe.
American well done is typically what is called burnt in continental Europe.
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Not dangerous by any sensible definition. The outside of the steak is hot enough to kill bacteria. The inside of the meat has no bacteria. The difference between medium rare and raw is the risk of foodborne illness.
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Not dangerous by any sensible definition. The outside of the steak is hot enough to kill bacteria. The inside of the meat has no bacteria. The difference between medium rare and raw is the risk of foodborne illness.
Yep. Steaks are relatively safe at lower temperatures. Ground meat products are the ones to watch out for a little more... I'd only trust a rare burger as much as I'd trust every individual involved in its preparation to have washed hands at all times.
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And yet the French seem to do fine with some pretty rare burgers. Ideally you'd cook steak rare to kill off any surface bacteria, then grind it with clean equipment, form it into patties and cook again. I doubt that's what actually happens though.
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Unless it is mechanically tenderized. Don't know about the States but in Canada it didn't need to be labeled as such until very recently.
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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.
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Miller High Life isn't bad. Don't really care for the other Miller types.
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Miller High Life isn't bad. Don't really care for the other Miller types.
Miller Low Life is pretty bad.
All of the modern conveniences will now be ours (Score:5, Funny)
Wooly mammoth vacuum cleaners, wooly mammoth shower heads, the possibilities for the modern stone age family are endless...
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It's a living.
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*golf clap*
Hunting for science! (Score:4, Interesting)
There is obviously some money for the research, and a zoo would bring in enough revenue to help offset research costs, but how much do you think someone might bid to be the first person in 10,000 years to hunt and kill a woolly mammoth? $20M? $50M? That would go a long way in funding further research. Even better: to do so with stone age weapons.
The contract could stipulate that the researchers still own the carcass, and therefore could profit from auctioning the hide or the ivory. Of course, it would be a long time after cloning until such an endeavor was even worthwhile.
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but how much do you think someone might bid to be the first person in 10,000 years to hunt and kill a woolly mammoth? $20M? $50M?
I don't know, let's ask GoDaddy CEO Scott Wagner what number he's writing on that cheque right now.
Re:Hunting for science! (Score:4, Informative)
Addendum: Whoops, it's GoDaddy founder and former CEO Bob Parsons who hunts elephants for fun.
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Re:Hunting for science! (Score:5, Insightful)
Even better: to do so with stone age weapons.
Stone-age mammoth hunting techniques tended to be group activities --- you needed many people with spears to wear a mammoth down from blood loss, or even drive it off a cliff. I doubt the type of folks who blow megabucks to compensate for their lacking manliness by murdering some poor big game critter from a distance would be interested in authentic re-creation of human cooperative social activities. Not that they wouldn't be interested in torturing a dying mammoth with some symbolic spear-thrusts after someone else has used modern technology to render the beast harmless and helpless.
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But conservationists might be interested in having such hunters being trampled by said mammoths.
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There is obviously some money for the research, and a zoo would bring in enough revenue to help offset research costs, but how much do you think someone might bid to be the first person in 10,000 years to hunt and kill a woolly mammoth?
Interesting question from this. After you clone it, is it an endangered species?
Also, did they find a male or a female? Assuming mammoths use an XY sex signature, would it be possible to engineer a female if it was male blood by putting two X genes together? Although it might be unviable if there's genetic defects in the X. Getting two of the same exact chromosome is generally bad...
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If you successfully clone something as complicated as a mammoth, then I think anything that we have preserved genetic material for is no longer endangered. We can make as many of them as we want.
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Hunting? I have it on good authority that powdered woolly mammoth bones are the ultimate aphrodisiac and male virility enhancement.
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how much do you think someone might bid to be the first person in 10,000 years to hunt and kill a woolly mammoth? $20M? $50M? That would go a long way in funding further research. Even better: to do so with stone age weapons.
I can't even begin to imagine the liability waiver you'd have to sign.
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Some [discovery.com] experts hold that mammoths were hunted to extinction beginning some 10,000 years ago by the species that was to become the planet's dominant predator -- humans.
Others argue that climate change was more to blame, leaving a species adapted for frigid climes ill-equipped to cope with a warming world.
Al Gore theorizes that it was climate change brought about by humans.
There are rules for these things. (Score:2)
Rule 34: There is porn of it, no exceptions.
Rule 35: If no porn is found at the moment, it will be made.
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Rule 34: There is porn of it, no exceptions. Rule 35: If no porn is found at the moment, it will be made.
Were I not at work right now, I would confirm the hunch than "mammoth" has already been used in a few titles so far.
Sweet (Score:2)
Hurry up (Score:2)
There are big profits awaiting if you manage to clone one of them. And a lot of patents to fill all in the way toward it. Is the kind of things that could improve, extend, or save the life of only the ones that kindly pays you a lot, for something cheap to produce.
Mammoth Implications for Climate Change? (Score:2)
For a woolly Mammoth to survive, in large numbers, its habitat had to have very dense forestation & vegetation, even if it was a colder climate.
The interesting question is why did they suddenly get "flash frozen?" Anything less would result in carcass predation and decomposition.
The only 2 answers I can give is that a sudden volcanic eruption could have occurred to blank out the sun nearly completely or there was an asteroid impact that blanked out the sky.
Either of those conditions should be obvious f
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The only 2 answers I can give is that a sudden volcanic eruption could have occurred to blank out the sun nearly completely or there was an asteroid impact that blanked out the sky.
Either of those conditions should be obvious from sediment records.
Well, "obvious" is a little strong but yes, these conditions should at least be detectable. There is ongoing research into the climate and ecological conditions around this time. The mainland Wooly Mammoths became extinct around 10000 BP [wikipedia.org], along with lots of other megafauna (large animals), all of which are grouped together in the "Quaternary Extinction Event" - the causes of which are currently being debated.
The Younger Dryas [wikipedia.org] cold spell did occur shortly before the mammoths disappeared (~12800 BP). Thi
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Reminds me of Futurama,, (Score:3)
The episode 'Fun on a Bun' where Bender digs up a 30,000 year old Woolly Mammoth from the ice to make sausages.. Should make for some tasty sausages!!
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fun_on_a_Bun [wikipedia.org]
" Meanwhile, Bender discovers that chef Elzar is there, ready to win the sausage-making challenge using pork that has been aged over 3000 years. Bender is determined to win the event, and takes a despondent Fry with him in the Planet Express ship to look for woolly mammoths frozen in a nearby glacier within Neander Valley, believing that meat aged over 30,000 years should certainly win. Bender is successful at finding a woolly mammoth, and with Fry's help, proceeds to grind the woolly mammoth into sausages."
Survive? (Score:5, Funny)
"I do not think that word means what you think it means."
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Additionally, I don't think that predators care about the start of historical records.
10,000 years old? (Score:2, Funny)
Learned nothing from the Jurassic Park fiasco? (Score:2)
Wooly Mammoths, running amok, skewering people with their tusks. Can we really handle another POS low budget Syfy movie?
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http://features.slashdot.org/story/13/05/29/1449208/neil-gaiman-amber-benson-and-the-blood-kiss-crew-answer-your-questions [slashdot.org]
Re:Half life of DNA is 521 years... (Score:4, Interesting)
What kind of 2-bit "internet hero" are you to think that, because your managed managed to reach nature.com, you now know more about DNA and cloning than the chief scientist Semyon Grigoryev, professor at North-East Federal University?
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What kind of 2-bit "internet hero" are you to think that, because your managed managed to reach nature.com, you now know more about DNA and cloning than the chief scientist Semyon Grigoryev, professor at North-East Federal University?
Hey, since when do we on Slashdot let the facts get in the way of a good argument?
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Semyon Grigoryev is director at the NEFU Museum of Mammoths, not a molecular biologist. The DNA was recovered by a Japanese colleague. So yeah, it's possible he knows more. I think I know more, but I'm on the record as predicting the premature senescence of Dolly the sheep to NBC News the days of the announcement that it had been cloned.
FWIW: This particular discovery is a repeat of one in 2012, and an earlier one in 2011, so the guy is pretty good at finding mammoth corpses. This repeats every several y
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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.
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So 10K years -- enough material and it should certainly be possible.
Not exactly. The article is about being able to retrieve any pieces of DNA, not fully intact DNA . To clone something, you will need it all, fully intact. After 521 years, half the bonds will be broken. By 10,000 years, only 0.000167% of the bonds would still be intact. So good luck trying to piece together fragments of DNA the right way into a complete sequence. Not to mention needing a host to bring it to term without it being rejected as an invading organism.
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No, you need enough parts of enough strands to be able to piece 'em together. And for help along the way, you can use asian elephants to help out (which seems to be their nearest uncle).
Re:Half life of DNA is 521 years... (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't need a full piece of DNA, just lots of small pieces you can combine into a full one. While I appreciate that posting on /. gives you the ability to second guess any amount of considered research and scientific understanding, from time to time reality does kick in.
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And you can fill in any remaining gaps with frog DNA!
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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.
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Interesting link there. The DNA studied in the story at the link sat at a temperature of 13.1 C. That is quite a bit above freezing, and temperature is a key aspect of speeding up aging. The oldest DNA sequenced is quite a bit older than 10,000 years (from your link)..
“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.. --- DNA has a 521-year half-life [nature.com]
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It doesn't matter how old it is, as long as there's enough frog DNA to fill in the gaps.
cthulhu fhtagn! (Score:3)
I'm not sure I'd want to risk that.
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What kind of 2-bit "scientists" are these that think they can clone an animal that died 10,000 years ago?
I'm going to assume they're the kind with degrees and an understanding of what "half-life" means, as opposed to the armchair kind who like to make themselves feel smarter than everyone else by crapping from on high on any article proclaiming the promise of advancing human knowledge by Googling around for the first article that even remotely appears to undermine the latest claim.
Perhaps you should have dug a little deeper than the first article you found that supported your implied hypothesis. You didn't e
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That article takes it to the logical conclusion and says their max viable age is something like half a million years. After 10,000 years, you'll have a lot of broken bonds, but this animal has a LOT of cells and a LOT of copies to work with. You can analyze all the fragments and work out at least one complete sequence if you have several billion copies.
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The half life of all DNA is 521 years [nature.com]. What kind of 2-bit "scientists" are these that think they can clone an animal that died 10,000 years ago?
If you read your own reference, you will see that the researchers believe they could recover sequences as old as 1.5 million years. Granted, "sequence" is not the same as "genome", but "10,000 years" is not the same as "500,000 years" (current record). So this seems reasonable to carry out.
Remember, in this case a half life denotes whole vs. broken sequences. You don't need unbroken DNA to sequence it. Remember, one of the first things they will do with the fragmented DNA is create a library [wikipedia.org], so they will h
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It's already on an island, the problem is that at those climates the sea freezes.