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n a quest to understand complex speech, scientists inserted what's been dubbed a human “language gene” into mice. Remarkably, the genetic tweak had a profound impact on the little rodents' ability to squeak, revealing astonishing clues about the evolution of vocal communication. Mouse pups that had the human version of the language gene showed different vocalization patterns from their buddies with the usual version mice have. When calling for their mother, their squeaks were higher pitched and featured a different selection of sounds than usual. “All baby mice make ultrasonic squeaks to their moms, and language researchers categorize the varying...

It’s 2040. You’re at your doctor’s office, going over the results of your genome analysis. An advanced AI has identified patterns in your DNA code that suggest you’re at high risk of developing a certain disease in the future. Thankfully, the same AI can be used to design a treatment. Generative biology Biology—the study of living things—has been going on since prehistoric times when our ancestors first determined through trial and error which plants were food and which were poison. Over the next tens of millennia, scientists would develop increasingly advanced new tools to help them in their quest to...

Swiss tech startup FinalSpark is now selling access to biocomputers that combine up to four tiny lab-grown human brains with silicon chips. This new product, called the Neuroplatform, uses small versions of human brains to do computer work instead of silicon chips. The company says it can fit 16 of these mini-brains onto the Neuroplatform and use a fraction of the energy required to power a traditional set up. The platform, currently adopted by nine institutions, integrates hardware, software and biology to create a processing system that is energy-efficient and high-performing. FinalSpark’s founders, Fred Jordan and Martin Kutter, hope to...

An aquarium and shark lab in Hendersonville is expecting a miracle birth any day -- with some exciting new additions. The Aquarium and Shark Lab by Team ECCO in downtown Hendersonville has an expectant stingray named Charlotte. But this pregnancy isn't just any normal pregnancy -- and because of that, staff thought the swelling they started to see in Charlotte in September might be cancer. Why? Because there was no possible way for her to have become pregnant -- or so they thought -- as there were no male sting rays in the tank. 'Miraculous birth' expected from stingray with...

Some 24 years ago, Diana Bianchi peered into a microscope at a piece of human thyroid and saw something that instantly gave her goosebumps. The sample had come from a woman who was chromosomally XX. But through the lens, Bianchi saw the unmistakable glimmer of Y chromosomes—dozens and dozens of them. “Clearly,” Bianchi told me, “part of her thyroid was entirely male.” The reason, Bianchi suspected, was pregnancy. Years ago, the patient had carried a male embryo, whose cells had at some point wandered out of the womb. They’d ended up in his mother’s thyroid—and, almost certainly, a bunch of...

“And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them” (Genesis 11:6). These chilling words from the account of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11 came to mind regarding this summary of a news article reporting on horrific new research out of Israel that created “‘complete’ models of human embryos” in the lab. These scientists, by disregarding the value of human life, have decided that “nothing will now be impossible” as they try to create synthetic human life.

“…scientists have created a hybrid embryo comprised of human and monkey cells.” “Interspecies chimera formation with human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) represents a necessary alternative to evaluate hPSC pluripotency in vivo and might constitute a promising strategy for various regenerative medicine applications, including the generation of organs and tissues for transplantation,” reads the summary of the paper published in the journal Cell.” “We demonstrated that hPSCs survived, proliferated, and generated several peri- and early post-implantation cell lineages inside monkey embryos.” (Scientists Successfully Create Embryo From Both Human and Monkey Cells, Lifesite News, Apr. 23, 2021)If you imagine, as these new...

Millions of fish are harvested across the world each year, but nearly half are killed due to diseases. However, studies have found that by inserting alligator genes into catfish, their survival chances increase by fivefold. The gene, dubbed cathelicidin, contains properties that protect reptiles from infections when wounded. Typically, farmers treat sick fish with antibiotics, but this contributes to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. But now scientists at Auburn University in Alabama are fusing the DNA of the two species. Scientists used CRISPR to insert the alligator gene that codes for cathelicidin into catfish. It found the survival rate of...

The mother's DNA tests showed that she’s also the uncle of her daughter. Doctors realized that the mom was a human chimera with DNA from more than one fetus. Last year two cases of human chimeras made headlines. The first was singer Taylor Muhl from California who discovered that she has two types of DNA: hers and her non-existent twin sister. That is, in her mother's case, two separate eggs were fertilized by two different sperm cells yet Taylor absorbed the genetic traits of the second embryo in the first stages of development. In Greek mythology, the chimera is a...

Scientists introduced a human gene, ARHGAP11B, into monkey fetuses. The gene caused an increase in the size of the monkey brains, including folding similar to that of human brains. The study poses some serious ethical questions on genetic engineering. ========================================================================= In an experiment that could portend a real-life Planet of the Apes situation, scientists spliced human genes into the fetus of a monkey to substantially increase the size of the primate’s brain. And it worked. Researchers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Germany and Japan’s Central Institute for Experimental Animals introduced a specifically...

Scientists Create Embryos Who are Part Human, Part Monkey for Dubious ResearchScientists are pushing new ethical boundaries with human-animal experimentation.On Thursday, an article published in the journal “Cell” describes how an international team of scientists created embryos that were part-human and part-monkey, or chimeras. The researchers used the embryos to explore the possibility of growing organs for people who need organ transplantsSpeaking with NPR, several U.S. scientists raised ethical concerns about the new experiment, but another bioethicist defended the research for having “lofty humanitarian goals.”But the means are not always justified by the end goal.Follow LifeNews on the MeWe social...

LEICESTER, United Kingdom – The creation of a human-nonhuman interspecies embryo is “deeply unethical,” according to the UK’s leading Catholic bioethics institute. The scientific journal Cell published the findings of a U.S.-Chinese team of scientists who placed human stem cells – which have the ability to turn into different types of tissue – into the embryo of a long-tailed macaque monkey, creating a chimera embryo with cells developing from the two different species. The researchers said they were studying possible methods of creating human organs for transplant, and the embryos were destroyed after 19 days, at which time they claimed...

Summary:Researchers have injected human stem cells into primate embryos and were able to grow chimeric embryos for a significant period of time -- up to 20 days. The research, despite its ethical concerns, has the potential to provide new insights into developmental biology and evolution. It also has implications for developing new models of human biology and disease. Investigators in China and the United States have injected human stem cells into primate embryos and were able to grow chimeric embryos for a significant period of time -- up to 20 days. The research, despite its ethical concerns, has the potential...

If you could cross a monkey with a human, what might that creature tell us? We are beginning to find out. In a pioneering and controversial experiment, scientists successfully created just such a hybrid: a chimeric combination of monkey and human cells, existing together in a living embryo that otherwise would never have been conceived by nature alone. Ethically fraught science? Yes. Mad science? No. While research into human-animal hybrids has a long and questionable history, in recent years researchers have pursued chimeric organisms to probe questions of biology that stand to offer significant gains in fields such as regenerative...

There’s no flitting around it, this is a rare bird. A cardinal that appears to be half-female and half-male was recently spotted in Pennsylvania. Jamie Hill, a birdwatcher for 48 years, documented the unusual sighting in a Facebook post on Sunday. “I had a once-in-a-lifetime, one in a million bird encounter!” he wrote. A friend of Hill’s had told him about an “unusual bird” seen at a bird feeder in Grand Valley in Warren County. The creature was bright red like a male cardinal on one side and brownish white like a female on the other.

Renowned European scientist: COVID-19 was engineered in China lab, effective vaccine ‘unlikely’ Professor Giuseppe Tritto, an internationally known expert in biotechnology and nanotechnology, says that the China Virus definitely wasn’t a freak of nature that happened to cross the species barrier from bat to man. August 10, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – It will not be possible for the Dr. Fauci’s of the world to dismiss Professor Giuseppe Tritto as a crank.  Not only is he an internationally known expert in biotechnology and nanotechnology who has had a stellar academic career, but he is also the president of the World Academy of...

A South Dakota company expects to start human trials next month for a Covid-19 antibody treatment derived from the plasma of cows. But these aren't just any cows. Scientists genetically engineered the animals to give them an immune system that's part human. That way, the animals produce disease-fighting human antibodies to Covid-19, which are then turned into a drug to attack the virus. "These animals are producing neutralizing antibodies that kill [the novel coronavirus] in the laboratory," Eddie Sullivan, CEO of SAB Biotherapeutics said in a statement to CNN. "We are eager to advance to the clinic as we move forward...

Two chimera piglets containing monkey DNA have been born in China. Although both died within a week and appeared to be normal, the baby animals had genetic material from cynomolgus monkeys in their heart, liver, spleen, lung and skin. Scientists said the research, which required more than 4,000 embryos to get the piglets, aims to find ways of growing human organs in animals for transplantation. “This is the first report of full-term monkey-pig chimeras”, Tang Hai at the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology in Beijing told New Scientist. Five-day old piglet embryos had monkey stem cells...

MtDNA exists separately from the rest of our DNA, inside the thousands of mitochondria within each cell, rather than the cell nucleus. It is so widely accepted as being from the mother's side it is sometimes known as the Eve Gene, the idea being that it can be traced back to some primeval mother of all living humans. Testing of mtDNA is used to identify maternal ancestry. However, all that will have to change after Dr Shiyu Luo of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. After testing of...

Even single-celled organisms desire partners every now and then. Leishmania—single-celled parasites that cause infections of the skin and internal organs—have long been known to multiply asexually, like bacteria. But occasionally, researchers have found hybrid parasites that carry genetic material from more than one strain—or even more than one species—of Leishmania, suggesting that some kind of genetic mixing is going on.Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have found that the hybrid Leishmania parasites can mate with one another to produce fertile offspring that carry genes from both parents—signs of...