Free Republic

LONG BEACH (CBS SF) – Speaking from the prestigious TED Conference in Long Beach Wednesday, Sausalito activist Stewart Brand said scientists are developing the ability to reassemble an extinct animal’s genome, and even recreate the animal itself. Brand, who gained fame after he campaigned to have the original NASA space photos of earth published, and subsequently created the Whole Earth Catalog, said Wednesday that “de-extinction” could be used to help restore organisms and habitats damaged human activity, according to a report in the Marin Independent Journal. A team of Harvard geneticists are currently working to bring back the passenger pigeon,...

THE recipe for making any creature is written in its DNA. So last November, when geneticists published the near-complete DNA sequence of the long-extinct woolly mammoth, there was much speculation about whether we could bring this behemoth back to life. Creating a living, breathing creature from a genome sequence that exists only in a computer's memory is not possible right now. But someone someday is sure to try it, predicts Stephan Schuster, a molecular biologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and a driving force behind the mammoth genome project. So besides the mammoth, what other extinct beasts might we...

The polar bear has become the new poster animal for environmentalists, and I can understand why. When it comes to "charismatic megafauna" - the term used by marketing experts at conservation groups - the bear is a giant improvement over the giant panda. The rotund panda may be cuddlier, but it is really more of a poster animal for gluttony and sloth. In the wild, it eats 12 hours a day and spends the rest of the time sleeping or hiding. In captivity, it can barely stir itself even to mate - Mei Xiang had to be artificially inseminated to...

SIDE EFFECTS Emily Dickinson was right: hope is the thing with feathers. What she didn't know was that it lives in an Arkansas swamp and has a big ivory bill. On Thursday, the day that scientists announced the first confirmed sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in 60 years, I went for a short paddle in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, where the bird was seen. I was with four other people, two from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which had made a major effort to confirm the sighting, and two from the Nature Conservancy, which has been buying land...

Douglas David Seifert The adult alligator has 80 teeth and a tail that can dislocate a person's jaw with a single whack. "They get a bad rap for being stupid little reptiles," says a scientist who studies — and admires — them. WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 - To the casual observer, an adult alligator afloat in an algae-dappled pond, its six-foot body motionless save for the sporadic darting of its devilish amber eyes, might conjure up any number of images, none of them fuzzy-wuzzy. A souvenir dinosaur. A log with teeth. A handbag waiting to happen. For Dr. Daphne Soares,...