Vincent J Lynch 🐘🦣🦥 🦇🐋🐢🐍

Which Star Trek series‽

It’s the second post that’s the banger 🫠

The Rodent With a Desert on its Shoulders In a refuge rarely visited by people, California’s giant kangaroo rat helps other species thrive.

Gorgeous essay on my previous study critter and site🧪🌏 www.biographic.com/the-rodent-w...

Thank you, @emptywheel.bsky.social for flagging this post to me. I took a close look at another data source, and this plane appears to have made a stop in Dubai. Probably didn't show up on ADSBx bc some of their feeders are down and there is a lot of signal jamming in the region rn.

HOWEVER, 1/

If you’re at #dros26 and you like transposons don’t miss Peiwei’s talk! 🔥🪰 We’re really excited about his findings!

William Whewell, influential British polymath & philosopher, coined words physicist & scientist, proposed new terminology for discoveries in chemistry by Faraday & in geology by Lyell. Mentioned in Trollope’s Barchester Towers; died #OTD 1866.
Professor, Master, Chancellor Trinity College Cambridge

I’m glad NPR included skeptical voices - because de-extinction is a dangerous fantasy - but we’ve seen this before. Colossal dangles a story/access, journalists take it and say other researchers have criticisms, and nothing changes save for an update to the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Mammoth! timeline

I teach a segment on conservation genetics in my molecular ecology class. My favorite moment is when my students realize that Colossal is just a bunch of conservation grifters. Technically, these guys would make more money by MORE species going extinct.

The science is as over-hyped and borderline fraudulent as the ethics are thorny (and that doesn't even count the George Church, friend of Epstein angle)

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

You’d know better than I!

Thomas Hurd (Univ Toronto) @tomhurd on how paternal mtDNA gets “cut out of inheritance”; 100s of mtDNA in oocyte but <1 per sperm; this elimination takes place within spermatogenesis from immature to mature sperm; mtDNA eliminated but not mitochondria themselves (sperm need energy to swim) #Dros26

Very cool! Almost all mitochondria in sperm are in the middle piece no? So by limiting which part of the sperm gets into the egg limits parental mt inheritance?

Food is politics. It always has been. Fancy food all the more so…

If memory serves this is one of the differences Cuvier used described mammoths as distinct from extant elephants no?

Laying of hands would be a really bad idea if so…

2-1-2-3
-———-
2-1-2-3

eh, there is a post not found error?

The Extinction of Truth Or, a Colossal Pile of Bullshit

Apropos the obvious...

substack.com/@devoevomed/...

A comprehensive genomic history of extinct and living elephants | PNAS Elephantids are the world&rsquo;s most iconic megafaunal family, yet there is no comprehensive genomic assessment of their relationships. We report a tot...

lol, we did some stuff. This is also a good reference:

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Memory does not serve. They claim 65.

colossal.com/mammoth/

I recall reading somewhere that the number of edits they were making was in the mid-20s (if my memory serves me right).

A reminder that captive births are very far from risk free in elephants. You cannot do a c-section if e.g. development or delivery goes wrong (=death to mum for sure).

Honestly, this would not pass an ethics committee in the UK, I am sure.

I hope this is just more of the usual nonsense

If the first Lammoth is two years away, that means gene-edited embryos are about to be implanted into surrogates any time now.

I have always argued that the use of elephants in experiments like this is unethical.

My opinion has not changed.

🧪 So if de-extincted 'mammoths' really are "about two years" away, then they need to be implanting embryos right now, as @toriherridge.bsky.social pointed out in 2024.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

I just cannot believe they have developed all the biotech necessary to do this...

Now this is how #DeExtinction is done. These are "Lazarus species" in my taxonomy of the dead.

#ColossalBio keeps on keeping on with their #DeExtinction #DisInformation campaign. Their GMOs aren't #DeExtinct species; they're just making designer transgenic animals. 🦣 🦤🐺 🧟 🧪

Cool!