Category Archives: Cloning

The Sims 4 has come a long way since it was first released almost seven years ago. Naturally, so have the mods that take the game to the next level. TwistedMexis T.O.O.L (Take Objects Off Lot) mod is one of the most powerful tools (pun intended) in any builders arsenal and a recent update to the mod cranked things up a gear.

While it still works best in Live Mode, a recent update to the T.O.O.L mod added the ability to use it in The Sims 4 Build Mode. Well do a more comprehensive tutorial on that in the near future (or you can check out TwistedMexis one below or on his YouTube channel).

But having recently spent far too much time than Id like to admit trying to figure out how to clone objects in this new mode, I thought a quick how-to might be useful for somebody else. Granted, I might also be the only one who cant spot the obvious, but Ill indulge myself anyway.

Lets start with the basics. If you want to use T.O.O.L in Build Mode, you have to also use TwistedMexis Better BuildBuy mod(which we highly recommend anyway). Once you have installed both, its pretty simple.

To toggle into T.O.O.L while in Build Mode (this works whether you have a Sim on the lot or not), hit Shift+T on your keyboard.

The interface looks a bit different to how T.O.O.L works in The Sims 4 Live Mode, but the basic functions are the same. However, you do have to be more careful when it comes to selecting and activating objects.

Any object you touch using the hand or select tool will be activated in the usual green highlight colour. You can also hold down the select tool for a few seconds to drag it in the usual way (provided it remains on the lot)

Just like in live mode, cloning objects with T.O.O.L works by hitting Shift and ALT on your keyboard at the same time. You can also select multiple objects and clone them in one go. The hand tool can be a bit confusing at first or like I said, maybe thats just me.

Yes, its that simple. To clone objects using the T.O.O.L mod in The Sims 4 Build Mode, you just have to toggle into T.O.O.L using Shift + T, select/toggle an object and then hit Shift + ALT.

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Sims 4: Using the T.O.O.L mod in build mode to clone objects - Extra Time Media

CHANDLER, Ariz., June 01, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mission-critical and other high-assurance systems deployed worldwide are under rapidly evolving threats from cybercriminals who attempt to extract Critical Program Information (CPI) via the FPGAs that power them. Microchip Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: MCHP) today announced it has extended its FPGA familys security with the DesignShield development tool that further helps prevent this information from being extracted for malicious purposes.

As a leader in the security space, Microchip offers a portfolio featuring the latest countermeasures for reducing the risk of cloning, intellectual property theft, reverse engineering, or the insertion of malicious Trojan Horses, said Bruce Weyer, vice president of Microchips FPGA business unit. Protecting CPI in deployed systems with our DesignShield tool is essential for national security and economic vibrancy. The tool advances the state of bitstream protection mechanisms and provides another defensive layer in ensuring that deployed systems behave as intended and are safe from counterfeiters and their threat to a developers design investments and brand reputation.

The DesignShield tool was created to protect developers of aerospace, defense and other high-assurance systems from cybercriminals trying to acquire an FPGAs bitstream from the fielded system. It deters reverse-engineering of the bitstream, which can often include CPI, by obscuring its logical equivalent using a combination of logic and routing-based encryption techniques. This improves design security and integrity while reducing system corruption risks, and reduces the possibility that custom code, intellectual property, or information critical to national security is used by non-authorized agents.

AvailabilityThe DesignShield tool is available under license as part of Microchips Early Access Program, which enables customers to begin designing with FPGA devices and design tools ahead of broader commercial availability. The DesignShield tool is part of Microchips Libero Development Tool Suite. For more information, contact DesignShield@microchip.com.

Microchips FPGA SecurityBased on non-volatile flash memory, Microchips FPGAs offer inherently better security than SRAM-based alternatives that expose sensitive bitstream data on every power cycle. Microchip FPGAs also include unique integrated security features that prevent overbuilding and cloning, protect design IP, and provide a root of trust, secure data communications and anti-tamper capabilities. The companys layered approach to security includes licensed, patented differential power analysis (DPA) protection, built-in certified security functions, built-in tamper detectors, and supply chain assurance that the FPGA is authentic. Security requires layers and not having a single wall to break through. DesignShield adds another layer that protects the authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality of a design.

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About Microchip TechnologyMicrochip Technology Inc. is a leading provider of smart, connected and secure embedded control solutions. Its easy-to-use development tools and comprehensive product portfolio enable customers to create optimal designs which reduce risk while lowering total system cost and time to market. The companys solutions serve more than 120,000 customers across the industrial, automotive, consumer, aerospace and defense, communications and computing markets. Headquartered in Chandler, Arizona, Microchip offers outstanding technical support along with dependable delivery and quality. For more information, visit the Microchip website at http://www.microchip.com.

Note: The Microchip name and logo and Microchip logo are registered trademarks of Microchip Technology Incorporated in the U.S.A. and other countries. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective companies.

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Microchip Further Protects FPGA-based Designs with First Tool that Combats Major Industry Threat to System - GlobeNewswire

An upcoming patch forWorld of WarcraftClassic, Blizzards old-schoolWoW experience, is going to let players choose between staying in the Classic Era, or moving to Burning Crusade Classic. Players who want to move characters to Burning Crusade can do so free of charge, but this is WoW, so some are going to want to play both. To accommodate this, Blizzard announced that it would allow users to clone their characters. That way, theyd have instances of a character on both versions. But, there was an issue with the WoW Classic cloning price.

The kicker was that it was set to cost $35 USD, which is a price thats somewhere between are you serious? and how could it possibly cost that much? This, of course, led to a lot of outspoken ire, as charging such a high price for simply cloning a character when most players already pay a monthly fee seemed a bit egregious. Instead of letting it lie and soaking up the anger, Blizzard has instead decided to significantly reduce the price. When Burning Crusade Classic goes live, it will only cost $15 USD, a price reduction of more than 50%. This new price will be reflected inWorld of Warcraft Classic once the cloning option shows up next week. $15 is still nothing to sneeze at, but Im glad that Blizzard was at least willing to do something to ameliorate the situation.

World of Warcraft Classic has been running since August of 2019, and it has kept the game in its 1.13 patch state since its inception. Beforehand, players experienced this older version of the game on private servers, until Blizzard stepped in to shut them down to offer their own service. Burning Crusade Classic, which launches June 1, is the same concept, albeit functioning as a time capsule version of the initial launch of Burning Crusade. The two Classic versions will operate alongside one another, meaning that there will possibly be further expansions included in the future.

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Blizzard drops WoW Classic character cloning price by more than half - PC Invasion

With global warming, economic uncertainty and the COVID-19 pandemic, the world feels like its in a precarious place as we head into the 2020s. But Russia may have a plan to stay on top by cloning an army of 3,000 year old super soldiers. The idea originates with Russia Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who proposed it at a meeting of the Russian Geographical Society last month.

Shoigu learned of the discovery of the frozen corpses of Scythian warriors in Siberia, which might be the perfect material for his legion of genetic monstrosities. The Scythians existed between the 9th and 2nd centuries BC and were famed for their combat skills and considered masters of horseback combat, crack archers and pioneers in using guerrilla tactics to undermine their enemies. Herodotus referred to them as being fed from horse blood, contributing to their terrifying reputation.

Shoigu raised the possibility of using their DNA, saying:

We would like very much to find the organic matter and I believe you understand what would follow that. It would be possible to make something of it, if not Dolly the Sheep. In general, it will be very interesting.

Now, there are a couple of flaws in this Metal Gear Solidass plan. First up is that we havent officially cloned any humans at all yet, let alone from DNA locked in permafrost for thousands of years. Secondly, you cant just toss a bunch of DNA into a cloning machine and have a trained warrior pop out the other end if you wanted a Scythian soldier youd have to raise them in a Scythian society. And even if you could do any of that, is an expert mounted rider with a bow really such a hot commodity in 21st century warfare?

Shoigus scheme does have one big upside to it, though itd be really cool. So, based on that alone, I say they pour as many resources as they need into this ancient super soldier program. Of course, this would leave the US with an ancient super soldier gap, so lets bring back some Greek Spartans and let them go all 300 against the Russian Scythians. Ill make the popcorn.

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Russias Considering Cloning An Army Of 3,000 Year Old Super Soldiers - We Got This Covered

Posted on May 12, 2021 in Science

Another wild week of news on Planet Earth, ranging from Russia cloning an ancient warrior army to the scary prospect of fossilized cities to the amazing story of the Apollo 14 Rock.

Elon Musk Is Maybe, Actually, Strangely, Going To Do This Mars Thing, reports Marina Koren for The Atlantic Take this path all the way to Boca Chica, past the solar-panel farms and storage sheds, past the little street that used to be called Joanna Street until Musk renamed it Rocket Road, and you end up on the beach, with sky and sea stretching out before you. Its a beautiful view on any day, and maybe, one day, itll be someones last look at Earth.

Is war in space inevitable?- Space.com asked experts about the ongoing militarization of space. What conditions could lead to clashes in space? Is such a situation a given, or can conflicts be short-circuited ahead of time? Could nations slip into off-planet muscle-flexing, quarreling and actual warfighting in space that might spark confrontation here on terra firma?

Bye-Bye, Bennu: NASA Heads Back to Earth With Asteroid Stash in Tow, reports The New York Times. The OSIRIS-REX mission will spend two years cruising home with space rock samples that could unlock secrets of the early solar system.

Alien plants: The search for photosynthesis on other worlds, reports New Scientist. Looking for signs of life in exoplanet atmospheres is fraught with uncertainty. But now that we can detect polarised light reflected directly off other worlds, we could spot unmistakable evidence of photosynthesis.

The Farthest Spacecraft from Earth Picks Up an Unexpected New Signal, reports Becky Ferreira for Motherboard Science. Voyager 1 has likely made the first continuous measurement of the density of matter in interstellar space.

How Cities Will Fossilize, reports David Farrier for The BBC If cities have a geological character, it begs the question of what they will leave behind in the stratigraphy of the 21st Century. Fossils are a kind of planetary memory of the shapes the world once wore. Just as the landscapes of the deep past are not forgotten, how will the rock record of the deep future remember Shanghai, New York and other great cities?

DNAs Histone Spools Hint at How Complex Cells Evolvedreports Quanta. New work shows that histones, long treated as boring spools for DNA, sit at the center of the origin story of eukaryotes and continue to play important roles in evolution and disease.

Russia Is Going to Try to Clone an Army of 3,000-Year-Old Scythian Warriors, reports Popular Mechanics When you hold a job like Defense Minister of Russia, you presumably have to be bold and think outside the box to protect your country from enemy advances. And with his latest strategic ideacloning an entire army of ancient warriorsSergei Shoigu is certainly taking a big swing. Shoigu, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggested using the DNA of 3,000-year-old Scythian warriors to potentially bring them back to life.

The Apollo Rock Half-a-Billion Years Before the Appearance of Life an Asteroid Blasted a Piece of Earth to the Moon, reports The Daily Galaxy. The absence of a lunar atmosphere, writes Loeb in The Moon as a Fishing Net for Extraterrestrial Life, guarantees that these messengers would reach the lunar surface without burning up. In addition, the geological inactivity of the moon implies that the record deposited on its surface will be preserved and not mixed with the deep lunar interior. Serving as a natural mailbox, the lunar surface collected all impacting objects during the past few billions of years. Most of this mail comes from within the solar system.

CIAs hunt for Osama bin Laden fueled vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan, reports New Scientist.

Invisible Monsters Supermassive Black Holes Roam the Milky Way, reports The Daily Galaxy. It is extremely unlikely that any wandering supermassive black hole will come close enough to our Sun to have any impact on our solar system, said lead author Michael Tremmel, a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. We estimate that a close approach of one of these wanderers that is able to affect our solar system should occur every 100 billion years or so, or nearly 10 times the age of the universe.

Giant sea lizard fossil shows diversity of life before asteroid hit, reports the University of Bath. he high diversity of the fauna shows how mosasaurs, giant marine lizards related to snakes and Komodo dragons, thrived in the final million years of the Cretaceous period before they, and most of all species on Earth, were wiped out by the impact of a giant asteroid 66 million years ago.

How planets form controls elements essential for life Rice University scientists attribute Earths nitrogen to rapid growth of moon- to Mars-sized bodies.

Marco Rubio is Taking UFOs Seriously and He Thinks You Should Too Dozens of men and women we have entrusted with the defense of our country are telling us about encounters with unidentified aircraft with capabilities we do not fully understand, Rubio said in exclusive comments ahead of a 60 Minutes interview that will air this weekend. We cannot allow the stigma of UFOs to keep us from seriously investigating these encounters.

Humans Have Been Sharing Food With Animals for Centuries. Why Is That? Researchers want to learn more about the connections between humans and the feeding of birds, beasts and other fauna.

Paralyzed man uses mindwriting brain computer to compose sentences, reports The Guardian. Man, known as T5, was able to write 18 words a minute with more than 94% accuracy on individual letters.

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Planet Earth Report Fossilized Cities of the Future to Russia Cloning an Army of 3,000-Year-Old Scythian War - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries...

Russian Geographical Society

When you hold a job like Defense Minister of Russia, you presumably have to be bold and think outside the box to protect your country from enemy advances. And with his latest strategic ideacloning an entire army of ancient warriorsSergei Shoigu is certainly taking a big swing.

In an online session of the Russian Geographical Society last month, Shoigu, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggested using the DNA of 3,000-year-old Scythian warriors to potentially bring them back to life. Yes, really.

First, some background: The Scythian people, who originally came from modern-day Iran, were nomads who traveled around Eurasia between the 9th and 2nd centuries B.C., building a powerful empire that endured for several centuries before finally being phased out by competitors. Two decades ago, archaeologists uncovered the well-preserved remains of the soldiers in a kurgan, or burial mound, in the Tuva region of Siberia.

Because of Tuvas position in southern Siberia, much of it is permafrost, meaning a form of soil or turf that always remains frozen. Its here where the Scythian warrior saga grows complex, because the frozen soil preserves biological matter better than other kinds of ground. Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu knows this better than anyone, because hes from Tuva.

Of course, we would like very much to find the organic matter and I believe you understand what would follow that, Shoigu told the Russian Geographical Society. It would be possible to make something of it, if not Dolly the Sheep. In general, it will be very interesting.

Shoigu subtly suggested going through some kind of human cloning process. But is that even possible?

To date, no one has cloned a human being. But scientists have successfully executed the therapeutic cloning of individual kinds of cells and other specific gene-editing work, and of course, there are high-profile examples of cloning pretty complex animals. Earlier this year, for example, scientists cloned an endangered U.S. species for the first time: a black-footed ferret whose donor has been dead for more than 30 years.

So, why are humans still off the menu?

Blame a technical problem with the most common form of cloning, which is called nuclear transfer. In this process, a somatic cell (like a skin or organ cell, with a specific established purpose in the body) has its nucleus carefully lifted out, and this nucleus is deposited in an oocyte, or egg cell, with its nucleus carefully removed. Its like a blank template waiting to have a new nucleus swapped in.

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From a technical perspective, cloning humans and other primates is more difficult than in other mammals, the National Institutes of Healths (NIH) National Human Genome Research Institute says on its website:

You might remember spindle proteins from your mitosis diagrams back in high school biology. And while theres a relatively easy way around this problem, its almost moot when cloning humans is considered extremely taboo in most of the world. In some places, its also explicitly illegal.

We would like very much to find the organic matter and I believe you understand what would follow that.

Curiously, the U.S. hasnt banned the gene editing of embryos. But the NIH doesnt fund research on the practice, and places like in-vitro clinics arent allowed to do any non-U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved manipulation of embryos under any circumstances.

That example starts to illustrate why the problem is so complexbecause a lot of cutting-edge genetic medicine is walking right up to the line without crossing it. Making laws that address full human embryo cloning, then, requires a jigsaw puzzle of careful language that doesnt rule out these kinds of therapeutic cloning.

HandoutGetty Images

But lets say Russia ignores all legality in favor of Shoigus big plans. In that case, scientists would have to develop a way to lift out the human nucleus without damaging the cell beyond repair.

Scientists have cloned certain monkeys, so primates are at least hypothetically still in the mix, despite the spindle proteins. But the success rate even for non-primate clones is already very lowit took Dolly the sheeps research team 277 attempts to get a viable embryo.

And what if all of that went perfectly? Well, the Scythians were powerful warriors and gifted horsemen, but scientistsor the Kremlinmust carefully monitor a cloned baby version of a deceased adult warrior for illnesses and other prosaic childhood problems. Who will raise these children? Who will be legally responsible for their wellbeing?

Shoigu may envision a future race of extremely capable fighters, but ... thats at least 20 years away, with an added coin flip on nature versus nurture. After all, the Scythian warriors didnt have plumbing, let alone smartphones. This is a whole new world.

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Russia Is Going to Try to Clone an Army of 3,000-Year-Old Scythian Warriors - Popular Mechanics

Off to Tempest Keep we go, starting June 1.

Hi from Auchindoun.

Nagrand is unscarred... for now.

The Netherstorm.

Shadowmoon Valley.

It's been a while, so we forget: Is it safe to eat the mushrooms in Zangarmarsh?

After World of Warcraft successfully relaunched its original "vanilla" client in 2019, fans began wondering whether the WoW Classic universe would eventually march toward expansion packslike the unofficial WoW Vanilla community had already done. That question was answered earlier this year with news that the officialWoW Classicline would indeed adopt 2007's Burning Crusade expansion sometime in 2021.

Blizzard firmed up this plan's timeline on Thursday, confirming that WoW Classic's Burning Crusade transition will kick off on June 1. Just like with 2019's launch of WoW Classic, anyone who pays for an ongoing WoW subscription will get full access to WoW Burning Crusade at no additional cost.

Today's news also clarifies the game's march toward "Classic but newer"it understands that some players may not want to stomp toward new zones like the Outland or new character species like the Blood Elf and Draenei. If you've already been playing WoW Classic since its 2019 launch, you'll be prompted starting on May 18 to peruse a new "cloning" feature, designed to let you dosomething with your current characters. The default is to pack that character up and move it to a newer Burning Crusade server, thus deleting its pre-expansion state. You can also lock an existing character so that it isnot moved forward to a Burning Crusade server, or you can split the difference and have two versions of a beloved character: one on an older server, trapped forever in a pre-expansion bubble, and one on a newer server, ready to march alongside the ever-moving tides of darkness.

This is probably a good time to work out your preferences, along with those of your WoW Classic-loving clan, and decide how far into WoW's past you're willing to go. The fact that Burning Crusade is being propped up suggests that the Blizzard Classic team isn't done here; the folks at Blizzard Classic might also one day do the same for 2010's tremendous Cataclysm expansion(which, honestly, is where I hope they stop). Of course, if you're the kind of old-school MMO player who makes time to juggle characters on two servers for two different expansion packs of the same game, Blizzard has your back.

Unfortunately, the May 18 pre-patch launch also leaves a certain class of player crunched for time: those who are eager to roll a new Burning Crusade character, particularly in the Blood Elf and Draenei races, and want to grind that character up to level 60 in time for the formal June 1 launch. Why exactly Blizzard didn't pad this time out for at least another week or so is beyond us.

And if you're wondering what to expect from WoW Classic's tiptoe toward Burning Crusade, stroll down memory lane with Ars Technica's review of the expansion when it was only two weeks old. The existing WoW Classic client is proof positive that Blizzard Classic is leaving well-enough alone, so it's truly back to 2007 here. Hence, apply rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia (or, ahem, rose-colored goggles) as you see fitespecially as we count down the days asanother good-looking Blizzard Classic project, Diablo II Resurrected, continues its own vague march toward a release in "2021."

Listing image by Blizzard Entertainment

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World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade re-returns on June 1, requires cloning - Ars Technica

The new Star Wars series, The Bad Batch, picks up a few of the threads left over from The Clone Wars and follows Clone Force 99, first introduced in that show's seventh season. Each member of 99 has some genetic variance that differentiates them from your run-of-the-mill trooper, referred to as "regs" by the Bad Batch.

It isn't a spoiler probably not even a surprise that the first episode of The Bad Batch orbits almost entirely around questions of cloning. Specifically, it asks various questions about the limits of cloning as it pertains to intentional variation. The regs are genetically designed to be compliant, identical, and interchangeable. The Bad Batch represents the other side of that coin: They are literally and figuratively defined by their differences, and therein lies their strength.

Cloning here on Earth is a little different (thankfully). Let's look at how it works and if something like the Bad Batch or regs are possible.

CLONING

In Star Wars, the Clone army is grown from genetic material provided by Jango Fett on the planet Kamino. The process by which the Clones were made is unclear, but we know they had to be made rapidly and en masse. In Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Lama Su mentions 200,000 Clones have already been made with a million more on the way.

Cloning of adult individuals, as we know it in the real world, is a complex and uncertain process with specific requirements. In order to clone an adult individual, scientists take somatic cells (non-reproductive cells) and insert them into an egg cell, in a process known as nuclear transfer. The egg cell has its nucleus removed, and the somatic cell then provides the genetic material the egg will duplicate. Before any of this can happen, scientists must harvest egg cells from a member of the target species, or one genetically close enough to pass muster. Once cell replication occurs in the egg, it is implanted into a surrogate in order for the embryo to grow.

Most often, the surrogate is a member of the same species, but that isn't always the case. In 2003, scientists cloned an extinct species of ibex by taking frozen cells and implanting the embryo into a closely related surrogate. In either case, each clone requires a surrogate in order for the embryo to mature.

The image of babies grown in test tubes is purely a science fiction trope and doesn't occur in the real world at least yet. One can imagine nightmare facilities on Kamino stocked with human surrogates birthing clones.

VARIATION

The common wisdom is that clones are always identical to their genetic donor, and it makes good sense. If the cloned offspring shares the same genetic information as its ancestor, then it should be an exact copy, no?

Sort of. It all comes down to natural variation and mutation, as well as environmental impact.

Of course, even an identical clone would have differences in temperament and personality. There are certain behaviors and dispositions that are genetically influenced but so much of who we are comes down to our experiences. More than that, even appearance can be impacted by our environment and random chance.

The first cloned cat was named Cc, short for copy cat or carbon copy, and while she was genetically identical to her mother, they looked strikingly different. Coat patterns aren't necessarily determined by genes, and Cc had a different pattern from her biological mother and surrogate mother.

We must also take into account how genes express themselves. Dolly, the famed sheep who holds the honor of being the first cloned mammal, died when she was 6 years old from a respiratory infection. She was survived, however, by cloned siblings that came from the same batch of cells as Dolly herself.

Despite being genetically identical, Dolly's four sisters (Dianna, Daisy, Denise, and Debbie) exhibited some differences as they aged. In particular, two of them experienced more advanced osteoarthritis than others, and that likely came down to environmental factors.

In what is perhaps the starkest example of variation in cloning, scientists have been able to derive both male and female clones from the same genetic material. While the new, enhanced female Clone named Omega, who the Bad Batch meets in their series' opening episode, isn't confirmed to be one of Jango's Clones, it is a possibility. If you want to get into the real-life weeds, you can start here, but the gist of it isn't too hard to grasp. Using particular mouse cell lines, researchers found a natural occurrence of about 2 percent wherein the Y chromosome was lost. Using those cells to create clones results in a mix of both male and female offspring from the same genetic material.

Despite all we know in this galaxy about cloning mammals after 25 years of doing it, we still don't have anything close to Star Wars' levels of understanding. The success rate is staggeringly low and we continue to learn that there is much more variation both before and after the cloning process takes place than we originally thought. The evidence seems to suggest that any population of clones numbering in the hundreds of thousands would likely have significant genetic variation. It's probably the case that "bad batches" would be much more common than we previously supposed.

Star Wars: The Bad Batch is now available on Disney+.

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Can clones have variations, as seen in Star Wars: The Bad Batch? - SYFY WIRE

On December 10, 2020, Elizabeth Ann made history just by being born. She isnt a British royal, an American married to a British royal, a movie stars daughter, or even human for that matter. Elizabeth Ann is a ferretbut perhaps the most famous ferret of all time.

More specifically, she is the clone of a black-footed ferret named Willa who has been dead for more than 30 years. Elizabeth Anns momentous birth marks the first successful cloning of an endangered species native to North America (endangered species like the gaur, or Indian bison, and the mouflon, a wild sheep originally found in Corsica and Sardinia, have been cloned previously). If she can breed successfully, Elizabeth Ann will add valuable genetic diversity to the very small estimated population of around 600 remaining black-footed ferrets, which are all descended from just seven animals. But low genetic diversity isnt the only thing standing in the way of these ferrets making a comeback. The other major threat is disease.

Diseases are a huge problem for many endangered species, but, as the previous year has emphasized all too well, diseases that circulate in animals can also have disastrous consequences if they jump to humans. Genetic engineering of animals in the wild might offer us a way to protect not only our furry friends and feathered compadres, but ourselves as well. Although still in the early stages of research, scientists around the world are working on numerous projects to engineer animals to be resistant to diseases that can impact humans as well, including plague, Lyme disease, dengue fever, and Zika.

Black-footed ferrets like Elizabeth Ann are especially susceptible to plague. While many of us have not given much thought to plague since our medieval history class, the bacterium responsible for this deadly diseaseYersinia pestisis very much alive and well, circulating in populations of small mammals throughout North and South America, Africa, and Asia.

Its all over the western part of the United States, says Bridget Baumgartner, a molecular biologist involved in the black-footed ferret conservation project at Revive & Restore, a wildlife organization that promotes the use of biotechnology in conservation. Unlike the black-footed ferret, plague isnt native to the Americasscientists think it was introduced a little over one hundred years ago, when the first known outbreak hit San Francisco in 1900. Because its new here, the black-footed ferret succumbs so quickly that they dont ever develop an immune response to it, says Baumgartner.

Right now, conservationists have to individually vaccinate each black-footed ferret against plague. While this is effective for now, it may not be a good solution in the long-run. It just creates this problem where theyre always going to be dependent on humans for their ability to survive in the wild. And thats not at all the goal of the program, Baumgartner says.

Genetic engineering might be the key to this frankly adorable species long-term survival in the wild.

Normally, different flavors of antibodies are made by B cells through a random genetic cut-and-paste process called somatic recombination. If a B cell has antibodies that are useful (i.e. they can bind to an antigen in a vaccine or a pathogen), that B cell gets copied many times over and refined. The immune system is then able to produce lots of the correct type of antibody, helping the body fight off the infection. But sometimes the infection moves faster than the immune system can respond, spelling disaster for the unfortunate person or animal.

Genetic engineering provides a shortcut. Instead of relying on the time-consuming process of B cells multiplying, scientists can insert the genetic code to make an anti-plague antibody into an animals DNA and then instruct any cell type to make these antibodies. That way, animals dont have to wait for a vaccine to develop a large group of cells capable of making an anti-plague antibodythey will be born with a population of cells that are constantly churning out anti-plague antibodies, keeping them protected from the disease. Even better, these genetic instructions would be passed down to the animals offspring as well, eliminating the need for further interventions.

But figuring out exactly how to do this is tricky and with fewer than a thousand black-footed ferrets left in existence, scientists dont want to troubleshoot the process by practicing on this endangered species. Instead, theyre starting with lab mice, whose genetics are extremely well-studied. Weve created a transgenic line of mice that express antibodies against plague in their germline, and can be passed on from generation to generation, says Baumgartner. Once mouse testing is complete, researchers would also perform testing in the more common domestic ferret to confirm safety and efficacy before implementing this technique in the black-footed ferret.

Baumgartner says that if this genetic engineering is successful, it will not only keep the ferrets from dying of the disease, it will also keep them from transmitting it. While engineering plague resistance in the black-footed ferret is largely for conservation purposes, blocking transmission is an important factor if scientists ever want to apply this technique to other species in order to protect humans. Perhaps in the future, this genetic engineering trick could be applied to other animals that transmit plague to humans (either through bites or via fleas)like prairie dogs in the United States, black rats in Madagascar, or great gerbils in Kazakhstan.

Other projects are more directly targeted at reducing human disease by engineering wildlife. Kevin Esvelt, director of the Sculpting Evolution group at MIT, has turned his attention to the white-footed mouse. With their big eyes and fuzzy white bellies, this species might not look dangerous, but in fact, they are an important natural reservoir for Lyme disease bacteria, which sicken an estimated 300,000 Americans every year.

While ticks are generally blamed for spreading Lyme disease, this is only half the story. Ticks arent born carrying Lyme disease bacteria; they pick up the bacteria when they feed on infected small mammals like the white-footed mouse. They can then transmit the bacteria to their next host, sometimes an unfortunate human. While deer are an important food source for the tick, they dont actually carry the bacteria andexcept in cases where it is possible to totally eliminate the deer populationsthere is insufficient evidence that reducing deer numbers helps control Lyme disease.

Thats why Esvelt and his team are looking for solutions that target the white-footed mouse. The scientists are searching for the most effective antibodies against Lyme disease in white-footed mice. Once they identify these antibodies, they could build instructions for these antibodies into the genome, just like scientists want to do with the black-footed ferret and plague antibodies. The team could then raise lots and lots of mice that constantly produce antibodies against Lyme disease, making them immune to Lyme. These mice could then be released into areas where Lyme disease is prevalent in order to reduce disease transmission.

Esvelt says that genetic instructions for antibodies that confer Lyme disease protection are already known in humans and in laboratory mice, and acknowledges that it would probably be easier to just take a protective gene from one of these species and put it in a white-footed mouse. But members of the communities in which the mice might be releasedNantucket and Marthas Vineyardexpressed that they would prefer that white-footed mice were only engineered to have genes from other individuals of their species, not genes from different species.

Even if its more difficult this way, Esvelt says community members should be able to have the final say. Its their environment, so its their call.

This is in accordance with research showing that the public is more concerned about transgenic animals (animals with genes from other species) than cisgenic animals (which are genetically modified, but with added genes from the same species). Cisgenic animals may be perceived as more natural, since their genetic structure is one that is technically possible in nature (i.e. it could occur through breeding or natural mutation) and thus may be seen as less problematic. Even if its more difficult this way, Esvelt says community members should be able to have the final say. Its their environment, so its their call.

Esvelt says that when it comes to ecological engineering, input from the communities that will be affected is extremely important. If scientists develop a new drug, he points out, you can always choose not to take it. But if scientists alter the place where you live by releasing genetically engineered animals, you cant choose not to be affected by the consequences.

If we deny [communities] a voice in what the technology looks like, if we dont tell them what were doing and invite their concerns and criticism and suggestions from the early experimental design stage when it matters, then were denying them a voice in decisions intended to affect them; where they wont be able to opt out, Esvelt says.

Although the team plans to start slowlyreleasing and analyzing the mice first on uninhabited islands and then on larger islands like Nantucketthe end goal is for Lyme-resistant mice to be implemented on the mainland, potentially greatly reducing the burden of Lyme disease in the United States.

Even further down the line, Esvelt says that lessons learned during this project could also be relevant for other diseases. For example, the white-footed mouse and its close relative the deer mouse both carry and transmit hantavirus to humans, causing severe and often fatal lung infections. Thus, engineering disease resistance in these mice could help protect humans from multiple types of dangerous pathogens.

Of course, no discussion of genetic engineering of wildlife is complete without including the worlds deadliest animal: the mosquito. Because they spread so many types of pathogenslike those that cause Zika, dengue, West Nile, yellow fever, and malaria, just to name a fewmosquitos are responsible for hundreds of thousands of human deaths each year. Omar Akbari, a professor of cell and developmental biology at the University of California, San Diego, wants to engineer a less-deadly mosquito. Among other creatures, Akbaris lab works with a species of mosquito called Aedes aegypti. Native to Africa, the Aedes aegypti mosquito now thrives on every continent except Antarctica, sowing epidemics of yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, and Zika, which have caused tremendous amounts of human suffering and death.

So far, Akbari and his collaborators have created Aedes aegypti mosquitos that are resistant to dengue and Zika virus. But the work doesnt stop thereAkbari says that these genetic engineering techniques could be applied to other species of mosquitos and other diseases. I think it can work for many different disease vectors, Akbari says. There are a lot of mosquito species on Earthover 3,500 different speciesbut theres really only a handful of them that are transmitting pathogens to us. By targeting these few species, scientists could have a major global health impact.

But while genetically engineering wild species could potentially have major benefits for the species themselves and the humans they share an environment with, the scientists working on these projects emphasize that caution is needed.

Careful evaluation of downstream ecological effects is essential. If the genetic engineering causes the species to become more abundant, scientists need to make sure that it doesnt harm the species that they consume or compete with. If the engineered species becomes less abundant, they need to make sure that doesnt impact animals that rely on that species for food. Just like plants and animals, pathogens may also fill a newly vacated ecological nicheso if animals no longer host one type of pathogen, scientists need to make sure that a new pathogen wont swoop in to claim the newly available real estate.

But ecology is a complex science and even with careful assessment, there may be unforeseen problems and scientists need to have a back-up plan if things go wrong. It comes down to being able to take it back. So thats one of the things thats scariest about itif we put [a genetically modified species] out in the wild, its not like we can just go and get it again, Baumgartner says. The safety mechanisms have to be developed in parallel with these genetic interventions.

Scientists are working on building these safety mechanisms into the animals themselves. If scientists want the genes for disease resistance to spread throughout an animal population, they can use a CRISPR-mediated gene drivea technique that alters the probability that the gene of interest will be inherited by offspring. While most genes have a 50 percent chance of being inherited by an organisms babies, scientists can use a gene drive to increase this likelihoodtheoretically up to 100 percent. Scientists do this by giving the animal genetic code not only for the disease resistance gene, but also code to build a CRISPR system to cut out the gene they dont want. The offspring of a modified organism and a wild organism starts out with one copy of the disease resistance gene and one copy of the wild gene. But the CRISPR system it inherited from the modified parent snips out the copy of the wild gene, which gets replaced by the modified, disease resistance gene. This happens every time a modified organism mates, resulting in all the offspring, and the offsprings offspring, and so on, having two copies of the disease resistance gene.

But once this drive gets going, it could result in this gene spreading to every animal of this species in the entire world, so researchers want to make sure there is a way to hit the brakes.

Scientists are experimenting with different ways to create gene drives that are self-limiting: drives that can be used to spread a gene throughout a local population but wont spread indefinitely. One way to do this is to split up the components that the gene drive needs to function. For example, in a split drive, scientists can split the drive into part A and part B and put them in different places on the genome. When an organism has part A and part B, the gene drive functions and all of the animals offspring will have the gene of interestin this case, the gene that makes it resistant to disease. But scientists can also make it costly for an organism to carry part A; maybe part A makes the animal just a little bit less able to survive or reproduce. After several generations, natural selection will eventually eliminate part A from the population. Without part A, the drive no longer functions, and the gene of interest will once again only have a 50 percent chance of being inherited.

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Scientists still need to do more testing on the various ways to put the brakes on a gene drive to make sure that they wont go awry once the animals are released into the wild. Currently, genetic modification is regulated on a country- or continent-level basis, which may be problematic as releasing a gene drive in one country could potentially affect many surrounding countries. In the United States, regulation of genetically modified organisms falls under the Coordinated Framework for Regulation of Biotechnology, which includes the FDA, USDA, and the EPA. Regulation is a contentious subject: Debates at the United Nations have turned into yelling matches and critics have argued that current regulations do not take into account input from local communities, who may be most affected by the release of gene-drive organisms.

Attempts to modify nature will always be haunted by early, carelessly initiated biocontrol effortslike the introduction of cane toads in Australia or mongooses in Hawaiithat had disastrous consequences for native wildlife. More recent failures have been less spectacularly devastating but still concerning; for example, a fly introduced to eat an invasive weed in Australia also appears to serve as a pollinator for it. In another case, gall flies were introduced to control a different invasive weed in the American West. Unfortunately, the fly larvae turned out to be a great source of nutrition for deer mice. As the deer mouse population increased, so too did the levels of hantavirus, which is carried by mice and can be deadly to humans. Clearly, more exhaustive evaluation of ecosystem effects was warranted in these scenarios.

Even with careful testing, assessment, and regulation, its possible that something could go wrong. The natural world is a complicated placeeven within a single square mile, it might not be possible to fully understand the interactions of every species of mammal, reptile, insect, plant, parasite, bacteria, fungus, and virus and how these interactions would respond to changes in the ecosystem.

As scientists and bioethicists have pointed out, many seemingly beneficial genetic changes could have catastrophic consequences. For example, if scientists engineered a species of coral to be resistant to climate change, it might be able to outcompete all of the other coral species on the reef, resulting in a loss of coral biodiversity and negative impacts on other creatures living in the reef ecosystem. Engineering animals to be pathogen-resistant puts new evolutionary pressures on the pathogen, which could cause it to change in dangerous ways: It might become more virulent or evolve the ability to infect different species, ultimately increasing instead of decreasing the burden of human disease.

However, while there are tangible risks of unforeseen consequences for releasing genetically engineered wildlife, there also could be serious consequences of not implementing these technologies. If you have a problem like malaria, for example, with no really great solutions, Akbari says, you have the risk of people dying if you dont use the new technology. Eventually, well need to choose whether to risk altering ecosystems with genetic engineering or risk the lives of humans and endangered species by foregoing it.

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Cloning Wildlife and Editing their Genes to Protect Them and Us - NEO.LIFE

The Ministry of National Security has debunked the allegation of phone cloning purported by one of the conveners of #FixtheCountry movement, Oliver Barker-Vormawor.

In a communiqu dated May 9, the Information Minister emphatically stated that the National Security operatives have no interest in monitoring the affairs of the said group, therefore, have no basis for cloning anyones phone.

According to Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, the group were invited by the ministry and as protocol demands, all phones of visitors are kept at the reception of the Ministry.

He further added that the phones of the conveners were not tampered with as being purported.

Mr Nkrumah noted that in instances where the Agencies of the Ministry have the need to investigate the electronic devices of a person, legal methods such as a proper court warrant are employed. The phone cloning allegation is therefore false and baseless.

The communiqu comes on the back of the allegation made by Mr Barker-Vormawor stating that the National Security operatives are monitoring the phone records of one of the prospective protesters.

This suspicion, he said, was triggered when the group were tricked into a meeting with sector ministers instead of the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) as they were earlier told to discuss their planned demonstration.

The only Android phone members of the movement had on them at the National Security Ministry according to Mr Vormawor, was cloned as calls to that particular phone number was being diverted to an unknown number registered by the name Monitoring.

Reacting to that the Ofoase-AyirebiMP refuted the assertion that the ministry lured the convenors into a meeting.

He said, the conveners were invited to a meeting to which they voluntarily attended. The allegation that they were coerced into a meeting is, therefore, untrue.

Mr Oppong Nkrumah further asked the general public to disregard the said allegation.

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#FixTheCountry convener's claim of phone cloning false and baseless - Oppong Nkrumah - Myjoyonline.com