GENETIC ENGINEERING OF A MAMMO-PHANT

China reported a COVID-19 Delta variant spreader incident linked to a school in Fujian Province.  September 19-21 is the major Mid-Autumn or Mooncake Festival when hundreds of millions travel.  First detected last Friday in the city of Putian, more than 100 have since been infected in three cities, where a virtual lockdown has been mandated.  Mind you, the entire country is averaging less than 50 new cases/day and no new deaths, compared to the USA with much more than 100/000 new cases/day and around 1000 new deaths/day.  Also, the population in this region is around 10 million, and Hawaii, with 1.4 million, has been averaging 500-1000 new cases/day the past two weeks.   Governor David Ige yesterday announced that he envisions no lockdown for the state.

A sure sign that Governor Gavin Newson will remain governor after the recall election today is that the most serious candidate, conservative talk-show host Larry Elder, has already accused Democrats of stealing the election.  By the way, I did not mention in my posting yesterday that there are 45 others seeking to replace Newson.   President Joe Biden came to California to defend Newson yesterday, and the party also announced a $2 trillion tax increase package of the super rich to pay for the upcoming $3.6 trillion budget package through a process called reconciliation.  Now, if only Senator Joe Manchin agrees, all will be well.

Norway essentially elected a "Democrat" to be the next prime minister, beating the Conservative.  There is a third party of socialists who are even more pro-environment aligned with these "Democrats."  Oh, the country has around 9 parties, plus.  Each color is a different one.  The oil and gas industry will thus be severely challenged, as global climate warming signs around the world dominated the discussion.

My topic for the day is genetic engineering to re-create a woolly mammoth, which went extinct only around 4000 years ago, and thus coexisted with Homo sapiens sapiens.  A genome project for this animal was completed in 2015, and scientists have been searching to revive the beast.

Mammoths were about the same size as elephants, and they are both related to the mastodon, plus dugongs and manatees.  The mastodon lived in Central/North America and declined because of climate warming around 10,000 years ago, and possibly too through overexploitation by Clovis hunters.  Similarly, humans were responsible for the final demise on Wrangel Island, but the wooly mammoth was already declining from genetic defects and global climate change.  The mastodon is to the right.

A new company was launched a few months ago and announced this week, Colossal, founded by Ben Lamm and George Church, the latter from Harvard Medical School.  They plan to use CRISPR technology to reprogram elephant DNA with mammoth characteristics, to help the hybrid survive in the Siberian tundra.  A MAMMO-PHANT.  Their hope is to revitalize grasslands in the Arctic to reduce the release of methane, which is from 25-100 times, molecule to molecule, worse than carbon dioxide for inducing the Greenhouse Effect.  If there are sufficient numbers of woolly mammoths, this will start the process of returning the grasslands.

Church has for eight years now led a group researching methods of creating mammoths.  Colossal gained funding from Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twins who were at Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg, gained fame suing him for stealing their Facebook idea.  Of course you heard of them before, for they were prominent in Social Dilemma, rowed together in the men's pairs rowing event at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and amassed a $6 billion Bitcoin fortune.

There are critics.  Victoria Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum in London, thought that geoengineering the Arctic environment with mammoths is just not plausible.  Gareth Phoenix, professor of plant and global change ecology at the University of Sheffield, was worried about unintended consequences.  Others are just concerned about using CRISPR for anything.  You can express your own position in this poll.  

You want the latest in fashion?  Watch some of the bizarre outfits walking on the red carpet at last night's Met Gala in New York.

Yes, you saw Naomi Osaka, Billie Eilish, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rihanna.

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Once Mega Typhoon Chanthu stalled east of Shanghai, then weakened into a tropical depression.

I might add that Hurricane Nicholas made landfall over Texas, knocked out power to half a million, has weakened, and will drop a lot of moisture over Houston and along the path of Hurricane Ida.

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