Category Archives: Cloning

By MATT OBRIEN and BARBARA ORTUTAY, AP Technology Writers

The revelation that a documentary filmmaker used voice-cloning software to make the late chef Anthony Bourdain say words he never spoke has drawn criticism amid ethical concerns about use of the powerful technology.

The movie Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain appeared in cinemas Friday and mostly features real footage of the beloved celebrity chef and globe-trotting television host before he died in 2018. But its director, Morgan Neville, told The New Yorker that a snippet of dialogue was created using artificial intelligence technology.

Thats renewed a debate about the future of voice-cloning technology, not just in the entertainment world but in politics and a fast-growing commercial sector dedicated to transforming text into realistic-sounding human speech.

Unapproved voice cloning is a slippery slope, said Andrew Mason, the founder and CEO of voice generator Descript, in a blog post Friday. As soon as you get into a world where youre making subjective judgment calls about whether specific cases can be ethical, it wont be long before anything goes.

Before this week, most of the public controversy around such technologies focused on the creation of hard-to-detect deepfakes using simulated audio and/or video and their potential to fuel misinformation and political conflict.

But Mason, who previously founded and led Groupon, said in an interview that Descript has repeatedly rejected requests to bring back a voice, including from people who have lost someone and are grieving.

Its not even so much that we want to pass judgment, he said. Were just saying you have to have some bright lines in whats OK and whats not.

Angry and uncomfortable reactions to the voice cloning in the Bourdain case reflect expectations and issues of disclosure and consent, said Sam Gregory, program director at Witness, a nonprofit working on using video technology for human rights. Obtaining consent and disclosing the technowizardry at work would have been appropriate, he said. Instead, viewers were stunned first by the fact of the audio fakery, then by the directors seeming dismissal of any ethical questions and expressed their displeasure online.

It touches also on our fears of death and ideas about the way people could take control of our digital likeness and make us say or do things without any way to stop it, Gregory said.

Director Morgan Neville attends the premiere of "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain" during the 20th Tribeca Festival at Brookfield Place on Friday, June 11, 2021, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Neville hasnt identified what tool he used to recreate Bourdains voice but said he used it for a few sentences that Bourdain wrote but never said aloud.

With the blessing of his estate and literary agent we used AI technology, Neville said in a written statement. It was a modern storytelling technique that I used in a few places where I thought it was important to make Tonys words come alive.

Neville also told GQ magazine that he got the approval of Bourdains widow and literary executor. The chefs wife, Ottavia Busia, responded by tweet: I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.

Although tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon have dominated text-to-speech research, there are now also a number of startups like Descript that offer voice-cloning software. The uses range from talking customer service chatbots to video games and podcasting.

Many of these voice cloning companies prominently feature an ethics policy on their website that explains the terms of use. Of nearly a dozen firms contacted by The Associated Press, many said they didnt recreate Bourdains voice and wouldnt have if asked. Others didnt respond.

We have pretty strong polices around what can be done on our platform, said Zohaib Ahmed, founder and CEO of Resemble AI, a Toronto company that sells a custom AI voice generator service. When youre creating a voice clone, it requires consent from whoevers voice it is.

Ahmed said the rare occasions where hes allowed some posthumous voice cloning were for academic research, including a project working with the voice of Winston Churchill, who died in 1965.

Ahmed said a more common commercial use is to edit a TV ad recorded by real voice actors and then customize it to a region by adding a local reference. Its also used to dub anime movies and other videos, by taking a voice in one language and making it speak a different language, he said.

He compared it to past innovations in the entertainment industry, from stunt actors to greenscreen technology.

Just seconds or minutes of recorded human speech can help teach an AI system to generate its own synthetic speech, though getting it to capture the clarity and rhythm of Anthony Bourdains voice probably took a lot more training, said Rupal Patel, a professor at Northeastern University who runs another voice-generating company, VocaliD, that focuses on customer service chatbots.

If you wanted it to speak really like him, youd need a lot, maybe 90 minutes of good, clean data, she said. Youre building an algorithm that learns to speak like Bourdain spoke.

Neville is an acclaimed documentarian who also directed the Fred Rogers portrait Wont You Be My Neighbor? and the Oscar-winning 20 Feet From Stardom. He began making his latest movie in 2019, more than a year after Bourdains death by suicide in June 2018.

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The new Anthony Bourdain documentary clones his voice, and its creeping people out - PennLive

The revelation that a documentary filmmaker used voice-cloning software to make the late chef Anthony Bourdain say words he never spoke has drawn criticism amid ethical concerns about use of the powerful technology.

The movie Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain appeared in cinemas Friday and mostly features real footage of the beloved celebrity chef and globe-trotting television host before he died in 2018. But its director, Morgan Neville, told The New Yorker that a snippet of dialogue was created using artificial intelligence technology.

Thats renewed a debate about the future of voice-cloning technology, not just in the entertainment world but in politics and a fast-growing commercial sector dedicated to transforming text into realistic-sounding human speech.

Unapproved voice cloning is a slippery slope, said Andrew Mason, the founder and CEO of voice generator Descript, in a blog post Friday. As soon as you get into a world where youre making subjective judgment calls about whether specific cases can be ethical, it wont be long before anything goes.

Before this week, most of the public controversy around such technologies focused on the creation of hard-to-detect deepfakes using simulated audio and/or video and their potential to fuel misinformation and political conflict.

But Mason, who previously founded and led Groupon, said in an interview that Descript has repeatedly rejected requests to bring back a voice, including from people who have lost someone and are grieving.

Its not even so much that we want to pass judgment, he said. Were just saying you have to have some bright lines in whats OK and whats not.

Angry and uncomfortable reactions to the voice cloning in the Bourdain case reflect expectations and issues of disclosure and consent, said Sam Gregory, program director at Witness, a nonprofit working on using video technology for human rights. Obtaining consent and disclosing the technowizardry at work would have been appropriate, he said. Instead, viewers were stunned first by the fact of the audio fakery, then by the directors seeming dismissal of any ethical questions and expressed their displeasure online.

It touches also on our fears of death and ideas about the way people could take control of our digital likeness and make us say or do things without any way to stop it, Gregory said.

Neville hasnt identified what tool he used to recreate Bourdains voice but said he used it for a few sentences that Bourdain wrote but never said aloud.

With the blessing of his estate and literary agent we used AI technology, Neville said in a written statement. It was a modern storytelling technique that I used in a few places where I thought it was important to make Tonys words come alive.

Neville also told GQ magazine that he got the approval of Bourdains widow and literary executor. The chefs wife, Ottavia Busia, responded by tweet: I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.

Although tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon have dominated text-to-speech research, there are now also a number of startups like Descript that offer voice-cloning software. The uses range from talking customer service chatbots to video games and podcasting.

Many of these voice cloning companies prominently feature an ethics policy on their website that explains the terms of use. Of nearly a dozen firms contacted by The Associated Press, many said they didnt recreate Bourdains voice and wouldnt have if asked. Others didnt respond.

We have pretty strong polices around what can be done on our platform, said Zohaib Ahmed, founder and CEO of Resemble AI, a Toronto company that sells a custom AI voice generator service. When youre creating a voice clone, it requires consent from whoevers voice it is.

Ahmed said the rare occasions where hes allowed some posthumous voice cloning were for academic research, including a project working with the voice of Winston Churchill, who died in 1965.

Ahmed said a more common commercial use is to edit a TV ad recorded by real voice actors and then customize it to a region by adding a local reference. Its also used to dub anime movies and other videos, by taking a voice in one language and making it speak a different language, he said.

He compared it to past innovations in the entertainment industry, from stunt actors to greenscreen technology.

Just seconds or minutes of recorded human speech can help teach an AI system to generate its own synthetic speech, though getting it to capture the clarity and rhythm of Anthony Bourdains voice probably took a lot more training, said Rupal Patel, a professor at Northeastern University who runs another voice-generating company, VocaliD, that focuses on customer service chatbots.

If you wanted it to speak really like him, youd need a lot, maybe 90 minutes of good, clean data, she said. Youre building an algorithm that learns to speak like Bourdain spoke.

Neville is an acclaimed documentarian who also directed the Fred Rogers portrait Wont You Be My Neighbor? and the Oscar-winning 20 Feet From Stardom. He began making his latest movie in 2019, more than a year after Bourdains death by suicide in June 2018.

Read more:

Why the Anthony Bourdain voice cloning creeps people out - Associated Press

getty

Over the last year or so, Twitter carried out an act of high-tech petit larceny: swiping what originally was Snapchats idea for a Stories function, where users publish ephmeral content to all their followers, and adding it to its app. Twitter called its version Fleets, since, well, the photos, text and video there enjoyed only fleeting existences.

This sort of theft is common place in Silicon Valley, and unless a business wants to lock horns with an opponent in a costly legal battle, theres not much to do about itexcept hope the copy-cat ends up meeting the same end as Fleets. Yep, the features a goner. Twitter said earlier this week it would remove Fleets on August 3, less than a year after it making widely available to users.

Plenty of other copy-cat products have perished, struggled or plain fizzled out in similar fashion. When Apple debuted Siri, Google and Microsoft both tried to come up with virtual assistants of their own (Google Now and Cortana, respectively). In a related sense. Spotify begat the less sucessful Apple Music. Likewise, Microsofts Surface Tablet and Apples iPad Proas well as Amazons connected home device Echo and Googles Google Home.

Cloning a competitor isnt a particularly noble pursuit. But probably the worst possible thing is making a imitation product that flops. Indeed, theres a way to produce a successful knockoff, and as Twitter and these others have found, a wrong way, too.

Probably the most obvious example of a successful bit of technological pilfering is what Instagram did with Stories back in 2016. Snapchat had pioneered the feature on its blossoming app, and it caught the attention of a young developer at Facebook, Michael Sayman, then 19. He noticed how frequently his friends sent messages through Snapchats Stories. It was huge with my friends, everyone was using it, he says. And with Facebook already feeling newly under pressure from Snapchat, Sayman brought up the matter in a meeting with CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

On Saymans urging, Facebook decided to first roll out its version of Stories on Instagram, which it had bought in 2012. It moved quickly: It saw the threat and met it, while Twitter would wait nearly five years to bolt on Stories to the top of its app. Even more importantly, Instagram offered some key improvements, something else that fouled up Fleets. Users could post saved photos to Instagram Stories. Eventually, Instagam would add things like Q&As, polls and links.

There was something else important about Stories. It gave Instagram users a different way to use the app. By 2016, the platform had already developed a reputation as the place to post glossy, glamorous photos. The disappearing Stories let users publish content that didnt met those standards, items you were comfortable seeing evaporate the next day. (And by contrast, Fleets didnt really offer Twitter users anything novel. Most standard tweets are pretty short-lived by nature, mostly passing thoughts.)

And more simply, Instagram offered a wider means of distribution for Stories. On Snapchat, users generally had only friends or close contacts to share Stories with or whoever had their phone number. Instagram gave people the chance to share Stories with anyone following their account. So a picture posted on Instagram Stories would be more likely to attract more engagement than one on Snapchat, an alluring prospect.

You can't literally just copy a feature and stick it on another app and guarantee that it's going to work. I think most cases that wouldn't work, Sayman says. When Instagram took the approach with Stories, it was much more about: how you provide a similar value. Key word: similar, not duplicative.

Instagrams gambit paid off. By 2018, Instagram stories had nearly 400 million daily users, while Snapchats growth had largely plateaued at half that figure.

The question of whether a knockoff can work will come up again soon with TikTok. It announced earlier this month two seperate acts of mimicry: Its going after Cameo with a marketplace for users to comission videos from influencers and taking a swipe at LinkedIn with TikTok Resumes, a part of its social network structured around video CVs.

Cameo CEO and cofounder Steve Galanis feels comfortable from where hes seated. He reasons that TikTok will fall into another trap for copy-cats: It will only half-heartedly pursue the task without brigning its full resources to bare. A marketplace to connect fans and celebs is the reason we exist. Its not the reason TikTok exists, Galanis says. If you have a product like that, TikToks best people arent going to be working on it. So its critical that our best people are better than the people at TikTok, and we continue to execute on our roadmap. As it happens, outrunning a larcenous rival is as a good way as any to contend with the situation.

Continued here:

How To Copy Your Business Rivals Idea And Get Away With It - Forbes

Behavioural cloning (Imitation learning) has been there in human race since ages. For learning various skills, we try to imitate the actions of the experts in that field. To become better sportsperson in a particular game, new entrants watch the videos of Olympic winners and try to imitate their actions. Similarly, children follow the actions of their parents while watching them throughout the early stages of their life.

Reinforcement learning is based on the philosophy of evaluating all the state space possibilities in context of agent and reward paradigm. While it has shown tremendous potential in solving many problems, but it has its own limitations in complex environments. Many times, it is not possible to define the state and reward due to the fluidity of the situation and you are not able to divide the activity into discrete steps or states.

Recent experiments by researchers have shown that if we can combine behavioural cloning with reinforcement learning mechanism, then it gives more promising outcomes. Behavioural cloning is kind of a supervised learning technique where you are pre-labelling some of the action sequence as best practices. In this the system will have a faster learning curve.

There are tremendous applications which will be suitable for imitation learning algorithms.

Improving our work force: We can train our AI system on the videos of best employees in your work force and can then benchmark others based on that. For example, in armed forces, if soldiers are supposed to respond in a certain way in specific situations, then the system will be trained on the best soldiers responding to those situations. These videos frames for best soldiers actions can be labelled for different activities. Rewards and penalties can be described based on these actions. Now the videos of any other soldier can be taken responding to those situations and AI can be applied to determine the final performance score. This kind of evaluation is applicable in any domain where some physical activity/skill is involved in completing the task. It will help you to improve your work force and eventually increase your productivity. Even if you want to automate your workplace then Robots can be trained using imitation learning. Instead of making the Robots to learn from zero knowledge base, they can learn from the best practitioners of the field using behavioural cloning.

Imitation Learning: As the Robots will become the norm in day-to-day life, it will be essential to localize them as per the cultural, ethical, and social requirements of the community. In such cases, imitation learning will be very useful. These machines can be augmented using the videos of local representatives on various customs, salutations, routine conversations, gestures etc and the robots will learn to respond accordingly in addition to their core task for which they have been built.

Physically Challenged People can operate devices: Equipment like TV, Washing Machine, Kitchen Equipment, Gardening equipment and others can be easily trained to be used by physically challenged people based on specific actions through voice, hand gestures, eye gestures etc depending upon the abilities of that person.

Autonomous cars: Similarly Autonomous cars can be trained using behavioural cloning of expert drivers. Many companies are already at advance stages of research on this to be used for their vehicles in specific terrains.

Eventually, the punchline is that if we have an example of some best action practices being done by animals, birds, humans, machines or other mechanisms, these actions can be recorded and labelled.

Then the AI models can be trained using the combination of Imitation learning and Reinforcement learning for the AI systems to improve their performance/accuracy.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE

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Behavioural cloning will push the limits of reinforcement learning - The Times of India Blog

When hives of the African lowland honeybee (Apis mellifera scutella) collapse, they do so because of an invisible inner threat: the growing, immortal clone army of a rival bee subspecies.

That army is possible because the female workers of the rival subspecies the South African Cape honeybee (Apis mellifera capensis) can create perfect copies of themselves, with one individual found to have done so millions of times in the past three decades. With this perpetual-cloning ability, the Cape honeybees sneak into the hives of their lowland honeybee rivals and churn out copy after copy (no need for a queen). Even worse, these clones are freeloaders, refusing to do any work.

Now, a new study has revealed the genetic foundations of the strange and formidable adaptation. Unlike most animals, and even their own queen, the female workers do not reshuffle the DNA of the eggs they lay. This enables the workers to consistently recreate a perfect copy of themselves a clone each time they reproduce. According to the researchers, the sidestepping of this DNA-reshuffling process is unlike anything they've ever seen.

Related: Gorgeous images of Australia's 'rainbow' bees will blow your mind

"It's incredible. It's also incredibly dysfunctional," lead author Benjamin Oldroyd, a professor of behavioral genetics at the University of Sydney, told Live Science, referring to the fact that reshuffling is normally required to hold chromosomes together during the egg-making process. "Yet, somehow they've managed to do it [still lay eggs]. It's insane; I've not heard of anything like this before, anywhere."

Honeybee workers and other social insects have the ability to reproduce via a form of asexual reproduction called thelytokous parthenogenesis, in which females produce female offspring from unfertilized eggs. Each time she creates offspring, the single-parent worker bee will replicate the chromosomes she received from her parents (a queen and a male drone) into four. Next, she takes the genetic material from all four chromosomes, reshuffles it and creates four chromosomes with that mixed-up DNA through a process called recombination. This reshuffling guarantees that, even with just one parent, future offspring will be genetically distinct.

However, as only two chromosomes out of the four are picked and no new genetic material is introduced by a sexual partner, this leads to an average loss of one-third of genetic diversity every time the shuffling is performed, or every generation, Oldroyd said. After just a few generations of parthenogenetic reproduction, the accumulated loss of genetic material leads to levels of genetic diversity that are low enough to be lethal.

Most social insects, therefore, rely on a queen that reproduces sexually on their behalf. In return, the genetically diverse workers maintain the health of the colony and protect the brood of their closely related siblings and cousins.

"It's like in a human society, we have this tension between what's good for the individual and what's good for society, and we come up with all of these social norms that allow us to function," Oldroyd said. "In honeybee societies, one of the things that evolved to suppress selfish behavior is [that] the workers generally can't lay eggs."

This is mostly true of the Cape honeybee, which on the whole abides by the usual rules of social insect reproduction, according to Oldroyd. But Cape honeybee workers have a genetic mutation that enables them to lay eggs parthenogenetically with all of the genetic material from the four chromosomes (so they dont throw out any of those chromosomes somehow). With that ability, they can prevent the immediate loss of genetic diversity caused by the reshuffling process. This allows them to clone themselves whenever they like for decades, even if cloning in the much longer term leads to a population that, on the whole, has no genetic diversity.

This cloning superpower places colonies on a much finer balancing point between individualism and sociality. And if they tip over, they may be at risk of extinction, according to the researchers.

To understand how the clones can create millions of copies of themselves and yet remain functional, Oldroyd and his team compared the genomes of Cape honeybee workers with those of their queen and her offspring.

After forcing the Cape queen to reproduce asexually by fitting her with surgical tape that prevented her from mating, the team examined certain DNA sequences of both the Cape queen and the 25 larvae she produced. Then, they did the same for four Cape honeybee workers and their 63 larvae.

The team discovered that the asexually reproduced offspring of the queen had levels of recombination (DNA mixing) 100 times greater than the genetically identical cloned offspring of the workers a finding that suggests the Cape worker bees have evolved a mutation that prevents recombination. Without the risk of a one-third loss of genetic material caused by the asexual reshuffling process, the workers are free to continually create perfect copies of themselves.

The workers ability to clone at will places their colonies in a much more precarious position, especially once the queen leaves or dies and the old social order collapses. Instead of expending energy to get the colony back on its feet, workers will dedicate themselves to selfish schemes such as finding ways to place their clones into positions of power.

"If you take the queen away, for instance, instead of raising a new queen like other bee species might, these bees will just start laying eggs themselves," Oldroyd said. "There are also cells, called queen cells, where the queen lays the eggs containing future queens. It's perfectly possible for a worker to fly in from another colony, or one of the existing workers in that colony to come and replace that queen egg with one of their clone eggs. That way, they can be genetically reincarnated as a queen."

But one lineage of Cape bee workers has taken this socially parasitic behavior even further, to the point where they no longer need a queen, and they solely exist by taking over the hives of the African lowland honeybee. Members belonging to a single branch of rogue clone Cape bee workers sneak into African lowland honeybee hives, which are commonly used for agricultural purposes, and lay as many eggs as they can, which the African lowland bees mistake for their own and rear.

The parasitic clone Cape bee larvae are in on this ruse, even sending signals to their unfortunate hosts to feed them as much as possible. This cuckoo-like behavior allows them to grow their bodies and their ovaries almost to the size of a queen's.

"The Cape bee clones don't do any work inside those hives because they've become reproductive," Oldroyd said. "They just strut around with this attitude like, 'Yeah, you're going to work for me.' It very quickly leads to the collapse of the hive. As individuals, these clones are quite dysfunctional, so you'd expect them to peter out. But they're a lot like the cells in a tumor in this regard it doesn't matter if every clone is healthy, so long as enough of them are around to exploit the host."

The Cape bee workers that take part in this parasitic behavior are the genetically identical descendants of a single worker that lived in 1990, according to Oldroyd. This single lineage of clones is responsible for the collapse of 10% of African lowland honeybee colonies every year.

Now that the researchers have a handle on how the workers can accomplish their bizarre cloning trick, they want to figure out how queens can switch on the gene that enables recombination and how the workers can switch it off. They also want to investigate the African lowland hives parasitized by Cape bee workers, to figure out what triggers the hive collapse.

The researchers published their findings June 9 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Originally published on Live Science.

Read the rest here:

Single bee is making an immortal clone army thanks to a genetic fluke - Livescience.com

Over the past three decades, a single individual bee has successfully created millions of clones of herself thanks to hitting a bizarre genetic jackpot.

This growing army of clones poses a serious risk to the hives of the African lowland honey bee, 10% of which are collapsing every year, as the colonies become filled with clones that consume their resources refuse to share in the work.

Scientists have described the bee's mechanism of reproduction as "incredible" and have traced the lineage back to a single worker bee that lived in 1990, according to research published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

It was previously known that the subspecies of Cape honeybee was capable of creating a perfect copy of itself, but this poses serious issues for genetic diversity.

Many forms of social insects are able to reproduce asexually, creating female offspring from unfertilised eggs using two of four chromosomes replicated from their parents.

These chromosomes are reshuffled in the process, meaning that the next generation will be genetically distinct - but there is a limit to how many generations can be reproduced in this way.

Because only two chromosomes are passed on and no new genetic material can be introduced to the next generation, every time a worker bee reproduces in this way the species loses about a third of its genetic material.

This is why most social insects depend on a queen for their reproduction, retaining the genetic diversity of the colony which is constituted of insects that are related.

But a new study has discovered that mutation in Cape honey bee workers is allowing them to pass on all of the genetic information from the four chromosomes from their parents, enabling the subspecies to clone itself for decades - although at the cost of genetic diversity.

Speaking to Live Science, the lead author of the study, Professor Benjamin Oldroyd, described the findings as "incredible" and also "incredibly dysfunctional". "Somehow they've managed to do it. It's insane, I've not heard of anything like this before, anywhere."

It is not clear what the end will be for the clone army, but Professor Oldroyd suggested it is likely to be an evolutionary dead-end, not just because the cloning system suppresses genetic changes but also as the self-interest of the clones might hamper their ability to respond to a catastrophe.

"If you take the queen away, for instance, instead of raising a new queen like other bee species might, these bees will just start laying eggs themselves," Professor Oldroyd told Live Science.

"There are also cells, called queen cells, where the queen lays the eggs containing future queens. It's perfectly possible for a worker to fly in from another colony, or one of the existing workers in that colony to come and replace that queen egg with one of their clone eggs. That way, they can be genetically reincarnated as a queen."

Because the Cape honey bee is reproductive, it does not contribute to any work inside of the hives it infests.

"They just strut around with this attitude like, 'Yeah, you're going to work for me.' It very quickly leads to the collapse of the hive," Professor Oldroyd added.

"As individuals, these clones are quite dysfunctional, so you'd expect them to peter out. But they're a lot like the cells in a tumour in this regard - it doesn't matter if every clone is healthy, so long as enough of them are around to exploit the host."

Read more:

In 1990 a bee learned to clone herself - now her army of millions threaten other species - Sky News

"It's incredible. It's also incredibly dysfunctional."Perfect Clones

In news thats emerged straight from your nightmares, scientists have discovered a subspecies of bees that can create perfect clones of itself and uses those clones to invade rival bee hives.

Scientists discovered that a female South African Cape honeybee doesnt reshuffle its DNA when it lays an egg, according to Live Science. This allows it to create perfect clones of itself every time it reproduces, rendering it virtually immortal. Scientists even discovered one bee in this subspecies that has produced millions of clones over the past three decades alone.

Researchers studying this unsettling phenomenon published a paper of their findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Its incredible. Its also incredibly dysfunctional, said Benjamin Oldroyd, lead author of the study and a professor of behavioral genetics at the University of Sydney, to Live Science.

Oldroyd is right to be surprised. Asexual reproduction isnt unusual when it comes to insects. When it happens though, the parents DNA is typically mixed up during a process called recombination. So even though the offspring has just one parent, their genetic makeup is different.

But thats not the case with the South African Cape honeybee, which seems to just be creating a perfect copy of its DNA every time it reproduces.

The bees actually pose a bit of a problem for its own colony and rival bee hives. Thats because in typical colonies, only the queen is able to reproduce. If the worker bees are able to create offspring, the hives become dysfunctional.

Eventually the workers just sort of hang around laying eggs not doing any work, Oldroyd said to New Scientist. The colony dies, and [the cloning workers] spread to the next colony.

According to Oldroyd, this phenomena kills off roughly 10 percent of South African bee colonies each year and is like a transmissible social cancer.

READ MORE: Single bee is making an immortal clone army thanks to a genetic fluke [Live Science]

More on clones: Chinese Scientists Cloned Gene-Edited Monkeys with Horrifying Results

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Excerpt from:

A Single Bee Has Created an Immortal Army with Millions of Clones - Futurism

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A little while ago in the Krakoan X-Men comic book Hellions, when Madelyne Pryor died, we discovered a new policy on the island of Krakoa. As part of the new X-Men status, mutants who die can be resurrected courtesy of Cerebro and The Five. But one of their rules is that they will not resurrect duplicates whether genetic, parallel dimensional versions of time travelling alternates.

Art from Hellions #4.We were first made aware of the policy from Krakoan's Quiet Council, after the death of Madelyne Pryor.

Time for Scott, her ex-husband to give the news her ex-boyfriend, his brother Alex

Got to lobe those Krakoan family trees. It didn't go down well.

In Cable, starring the son of Madelyne Pryor (told you), he has own issues, tracking down Stryfe, the clone of his future self who he killed, who is stealing mutant babies.

Which brought back memories of Inferno, when Madelyne Pryor and mutant babies were used by Mister Sinister, and some senior demons to bring Hell to Manhattan.

All the time that Sinister has been disobeying the No More Clones rule with himself and we know he has other secret cloning-related plans with chimera as well.

And as a result of these rules, neither Madelyne Pryor or her child, the adult Cable, were allowed to be brought back from the dead with the rest, even as Teen Cable tries to make the latter happen.

X-Factor were tasked with establishing Proof of Death before reviving someone, so to avoid having multiple versions of the same person and soul -running around. Though we still reckon that happened with Laura Kinney and Old Woman Wolverine in X-Men. Did Laura Kinnery really die in the Vault? Was the younger version of herself resurrected without her Vault memories and now a member of the new X-Men team, at some point have to face a version of herself that has lasted centuries?

But there still seems to be some wiggle room. In Wolverine #12, The Five resurrect Logan even though he hasn't died. Just a version of him without a soul or a brain. And naturally Gabby, herself a clone of Laura Kinney, has some concerns in New Mutants as well.

With a little more pushback than Havok was able to give.

There's also concerns in Cable regarding Stryfe's plans being similar to those that started Inferno, and Majik checks there too.

While in the most recent New Mutants, we discovered that Gabby had, herself, mysteriously died on the island of Krakoa, at the end of the Hellfire Gala.

With the question as to would she be revived under Krakoan laws against reviving clones? And could the revival of Laura Kinney as Wolverine, when Old Woman Wolverine inevitably turns up, underline the issues here? In today's Cable #12 however, Teen Cable makes the case

finally gets his way. And Old Man Cable is revived.

With a couple of mentions for everyone watching Loki at the moment and wondering about the TVA.

Also The Summers War againsgt Stryfe? And that it all may be heading to an early Inferno. As Stryfe has been doing his own cloning, far away from Krakoa.

We presumed that the new Inferno from Jonathan Hickman and Valerio Schiti would be a very different ebast to the original Inferno, more about Mystique burning down Krakoa. Could there also be a more.. traditional bent to it as well?

CABLE #11MARVEL COMICSMAR210592(W) Gerry Duggan (A/CA) Phil NotoSUMMERS END!Some summers seem like they will never end. And some end too soon.Rated T+In Shops: Jun 30, 2021 SRP: $3.99

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Cable, Krakoan Clones And Setting Up An Early Inferno? (Spoilers) - Bleeding Cool News

In the episode, The Bad Batch finally solves one of its most intriguing mysteries: the origin of Omega, a young, blond clone who obviously doesnt look like the rest of her people (not to mention that shes a girl, while all of the other clones are male). But her appearance isnt the only special thing about her. We also learn that shes an unmodified clone created from Jango Fetts DNA just like Boba Fett! Even her name ties into Jango Fetts clone son, who was originally designated the code name Alpha before the bounty hunter named him. Yes, Omega is sort of Boba Fetts sisterfrom a certain point of view.

Its Tech who reveals the truth to his companions after studying Omegas DNA more closely: I further analyzed Omegas genetic profile and discovered she has pure, first-generation DNA, he says in the episode. All clones were created from a host named Jango Fett. While our genetic structure was modified for growth and acceleration and obedience, Omega is a pure genetic replication.

Therefore, since the Kaminoans have lost track of Boba in the years since the Clone Wars started, Omega is the only remaining source of Jangos original DNA, the key to creating more Gen 1 clones and restoring the Clone Army to its glory days.

Earlier episodes allude to the fact that so many generations of clones have been created from Fetts DNA at this point that the original genetic strain has been stretched too thin, resulting in mutations in the line as opposed to 1:1 copies of the Gen 1 clones. The rogue-ish Bad Batch, for example, are the result of these mutations.

Recovering Omegas DNA would allow the Kaminoans to restore its line of Jango Fett clones to their purest form, which Lama Su believes will put his cloning facility back in the Empires good graces. He hires bounty hunter Cad Bane to recover the asset and bring her back to Kamino so that he can extract a sample of her DNA and terminate her.

But not all Kaminoans agree that this is the right course of action. Chief medical scientist Nala Se, one of the key engineers of the clone army, has hatched her own plan to save Omega, whom she feels protective of despite her beliefs in The Clone Wars that clones are disposable. It seems that Nala Se has had a change of heart.

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Star Wars: The Bad Batch Reveals the Fate of an Attack of the Clones Character - Den of Geek

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If you're still using a traditional, spinning hard disk on your PC, you're missing out. Swapping it out for a solid-state drive (SSD) is one of the best upgrades you can make in terms of speeding up your computer. It'll boot faster, programs will launch instantly, and games won't take so long to load anymore.

You could reinstall Windows from scratch, and in some situations, that may be preferablebut with the right tools, you can get up and running much quicker by copying your entire drive over to the new SSD.

Obviously, in order to upgrade to an SSD, you'll need to, well, buy an SSD. We have some recommendations, but if you're on a budget, we have a separate list of cheap SSDs as well. Make sure to buy the right form factor for your computer (some laptops will use 2.5-inch drives, while others might use M.2 or mSATA drives), and get one big enough to fit all your data. If you have a 500GB hard drive now, you should probably spring for a similarly sized SSD (or larger, to accommodate future data).

The only exception is if you're on a desktop computer and have room for multiple hard drives. In that case, you could store Windows and your programs on the SSD while putting your music, movies, and other media on a second, larger hard diskthough this can be a bit more complicated, as we'll discuss below.

During this process, you'll need both your SSD and your old hard drive connected to your computer at the same time. If you're using a laptop with only one hard drive slot, that means you'll need an external adapter, dock, or enclosure that can connect your bare SSD to your computer over USB. (Again, desktop users may not need this if they have room for two drives inside their PCyou can just install it internally alongside your old hard drive.)

There are many different drive-cloning tools on the market, and unfortunately there's no free, one-size-fits-all option. If your drive manufacturer offers a migration program, that might be your best bet. For example, if you bought a Samsung SSD, we recommend downloading Samsung Data Migration and following the instructions in the user guide. Western Digital and SanDisk users can use WD's version of Acronis True Image to copy their data using these instructions.

For this guide, we'll be using Macrium Reflectit's a free drive-cloning tool that works with any brand of hard drive and SSD. Just download the installer for the free home version and run through the wizard to get it up and running on your PC. It's available to anyone, no matter what brand drive you have, so if your drive manufacturer doesn't offer a migration tool, Macrium Reflect is your next best bet.

Once you've gathered your necessities, it's time to get started.

Before you start messing with drives and formatting partitions, it's absolutely necessary to back up your data first. An accidental click can result in you erasing everything, so do not continue until you've backed it all up.

If you don't have a backup yet, check out our favorite software for the job. Windows also has File History for backing up important documents, and an image file can save your entire system. Copying important data to an external hard drive will also do in a pinch.

If you're upgrading to an SSD that's smaller than your current hard drive, you'll want to take extra care here. This isn't as common as it once was, thanks to bigger, less expensive SSDs, but if that's the case for you, you'll need to delete some files and free up space on your hard drive before cloning it. Otherwise, your data won't fit on the new drive. Once your data is safe and secure, continue to the next step.

Plug your SSD into the SATA-to-USB adapter, then plug that into your computer. If it's a brand-new drive, you probably won't see the drive pop up in File Explorer, but don't worry; it just needs to be initialized first. Open the Start menu and type "partitions" in the search box. Click the Create and format hard disk partitions option, and Disk Management will open. It will prompt you to initialize the drive using either the GPT or MBR partition table.

I'll be using GPT for my SSD, since I have a modern PC with a UEFI firmware. If you have an older PC with a traditional BIOS, you may need to use an MBR partition table. If you aren't sure, look up your specific model of PC or motherboard to see which type of firmware it uses.

If you aren't prompted to initialize the drive, and don't see it in Disk Management, double-check that it's properly connected to your computer, and that the enclosure or dock is powered on (if necessary). See our guide to troubleshooting a hard drive that won't show up for more.

Once the drive has been initialized, you should see the drive show up in the bottom pane of Disk Management as unallocated space. From there, you should be good to go.

Open Macrium Reflect and you should see a list of drives in the main window. Find your current driveit'll list your C: partition with a Windows logoand select it. Click the Clone This Disk button that appears below that drive to start the cloning wizard.

This will bring up a new window where you will choose your destination drivein this case, your empty SSD. If your SSD is the same size as your old drive, make sure the box all the way to the left of your source disk is checked, as shown above, then click Select a Disk to Clone. Choose your SSD from the drop-down list, and click Next.

If your SSD is significantly smaller than your old drive, this may require an extra step. Reflect will attempt to automatically shrink partitions with free space to fit it all on the drive, but in my experience, it doesn't always do this intelligently, and may leave out one of Windows' recovery partitions. If you experience this problem, you can manually drag each partition down to the SSD, and click Cloned Partition Properties on your main C: drive to resize it manually.

If your SSD is larger than your old drive, it may leave some unused space on the drivein which case you'll want to select your main partition, click Cloned Partition Properties, and expand the drive to fill that empty space.

Click Next and you'll be asked if you want to save this backup schedule. You can uncheck that box and click OK to run the backup now, one time. This can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on how large the disks are, so go watch Netflix and come back later.

When its done, you can exit Macrium Reflect. You should see your new SSD in File Explorer, complete with all your data.

Next, shut down your computer. It's time to install that SSD in your machine permanently. If you have a laptop with only one hard drive slot, you'll need to remove your old hard drive and replace it with your SSD. This is a bit different on every laptop.

If you have a desktop PC with more than one hard drive slot, you can leave your old hard drive in as extra storage, and just install your SSD alongside it.

Once you're finished installing the SSD, you'll need to tell your computer to boot from it. (This may not be necessary on laptops with just one drive, but if you experience problems booting, it can help on some PCs.) Turn your computer on and enter its BIOS/UEFI setupthis is a bit different on every PC, but it'll usually say something like "Press DEL to enter setup" on the boot screen, so you'll want to press the corresponding key as it starts up.

From there, look for your BIOS's boot options. These will be in a different spot depending on your computer, but once you find them, select the option to change the boot sequence. Choose your SSD from the list as the first boot drive, then head back to the BIOS's main menu to exit, saving your settings.

Your computer will reboot, and if all went well, it should plop you back into Windows faster than ever before. Open File Explorer and check to confirm that your SSD is, in fact, the C: drive. If everything looks good, you're ready to rock.

If your old drive is still installed, you can erase it and use it to store extra files, or you can disconnect it entirely. Best of all, your computer should feel significantly snappier without having to start from scratch.

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How to Copy Your Windows Installation to an SSD - PCMag