Tag Archives: DNA

Of Mammoths Wild and Woolly

Woolly mammoth skeleton at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Photo by Kevin Burkett.
Woolly mammoth skeleton on display at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Photo by Kevin Burkett.

We love dinosaurs, but we never shared the planet with them. Such was not the case with woolly mammoths, which we once hunted, chowed down on, and used for tools and building materials. You don’t see T-Rexes on cave walls, but some of the earliest sculpture and art by human hands depicts these elephantine throw rugs.

Today, their well-preserved remains contain muscle, blood, teeth, bone, tusk and even brain. We’ve recovered and sequenced mammoth DNA, something we’ll never be able to do with dinosaurs. But if all you know about these majestic creatures comes from old Flintstones episodes, then join me as I explore …

How Woolly Mammoths Worked

Biohackers Take DIY Approach to Biological Future

Image of Neil Harbisson
Neil Harbisson, cyborg. Photo by Moon Ribas.

Not terribly long ago, do-it-yourself projects were the province of shade-tree mechanics and people who kept wood lathes in their garages. They dealt with grease and iron, wood and wiring, and left anything biological to the experts.

But today, body-modifying grinders implant jury-rigged biotech via the kitchen cutting board. Elsewhere, basement biohackers collaborate to build a better biological mousetrap, while volunteers teach basic genomics in community biotech spaces. Little by little, small pockets of enterprising people are working to make the long-promised post-human, cyborg, genomic future a reality.

How Biohacking Works

The Future: At the Corner of Close and Soon

Aerocar 600 fantasy flying car
Not quite what we had in mind.
(Photo by Joe Mabel)

Somehow the future we get is never quite the one we were promised. Then again, sometimes the very ideas wrapped in the pages of sci-fi and Popular Science are right under our noses, in disguise. After all, we have hand-held sensor-communicators and miraculous supermaterials – they just take the rather mundane form of carbon-fiber-wrapped smartphones.

Maybe our blindness arises from our physical and electronic architecture. Has exchanging Googie buildings for Google caused us to overlook the flying-car equivalents that fill our everyday lives, or soon will? Read on.

Our 10 Favorite Replacements for ‘Where’s My Flying Car?’

Driving by Larch Light

Photo courtesy Glowing Plant.

Would you want to live in a world that looks like a Pandora knockoff, or blares like the wall decorations of a stoner crash pad? What if you couldn’t turn it off?

Such were the questions raised when a Kickstarter campaign launched to “create real glowing plants in a do-it-yourself biolab in California.” At first, observers merely wondered if the technology could work. But as time passed, their questions moved on to more troubling concerns regarding the unregulated spreading of genetically modified seeds…

Could glow-in-the-dark plants replace streetlights?