Frozen mice cloned - are woolly mammoths next?

piggy submitted, created time 2 weeks 2 days (www.reuters.com)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Japanese scientists have cloned mice whose bodies were frozen for as long sixteen years and said on Monday it may be possible to use the technique to resurrect mammoths and other extinct species.

Mouse cloning expert Teruhiko Wakayama and colleagues at the Center for Developmental Biology, at Japan's RIKEN research institute in Yokohama, managed to clone the mice even though their cells had burst.

4 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: endangered species conservation extinct species woolly mammoths somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning extinct species nuclear transfer

Alternative energy: Nuclear power makes a comeback

Darkfrog submitted, created time 4 weeks 5 hours (www.nytimes.com)

Unlike countries such as France, which maintained a strong tradition of nuclear power throughout the latter twentieth century, the United States has not had an uncancelled commission for a nuclear power plant since 1973. The Arab oil embargo of that decade, as well as the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters, changed the economic and political climate in such a way that made nuclear plants less economically and politically viable.

Still there are over one hundred nuclear power plants in the greater U.S. that have remained in operation all these years

2 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: nuclear energy nuclear plants nuclear power power energy politics alternative energy fuel power plants fossil fuels environmentalism

Damming doesn't hurt salmon? Something is fishy, scientists say.

Darkfrog submitted, created time 3 weeks 3 days (www.nature.com)

Damming rivers is an environmental conundrum. On the one hand, hydroelectric power provides clean, relatively reliable energy. On the other, damming rivers can endanger fish populations ...or can it? A recent study performed on the dammed Columbia River and undammed Fraser River suggests that perhaps the smolts are all right.

Salmon travel the rivers at two points in their lives: first, they must find their way downriver to the ocean as smolts (juveniles) and second, they must find their way back upstream to the spawning grounds in the last stage of their lives

3 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: salmon Chinook salmon rivers Columbia River dams alternative energy hydroelectric power endangered species fish fish biology

First ozone measurements from Everest's peak

sea-maid submitted, created time 3 weeks 2 days (www.nature.com)

The first ozone measurement taken on the summit of Mount Everest has revealed surprisingly high levels of ozone, which scientists involved in the expedition suggest might have originated from urban pollution.

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What Obama's win means for science

sea-maid submitted, created time 2 weeks 1 day (www.nature.com)

This article is Nature's writeup of the future of science under President Barack Obama. It was published while results from several U.S. states were still pending but Senator Obama had already attained 297 electoral votes, more than the 270 required to declare a winner.

The article claims that both Obama and McCain's policies on the sciences would be very different from President George W. Bush's, but not necessarily as different from each other as many of their supporters seem to think

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Microbes drove Earth's mineral evolution

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 days 10 hours (www.nature.com)

A comprehensive history of Earth's mineral wealth concludes that without life, many raw materials wouldn't exist. In the early interstellar medium, scientists say, there were about twelve minerals. The planetary formation process upped this to around sixty. The addition of water (itself a mineral) allows for more different kinds of reactions and the mineral count jumps into the hundreds

6 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: minerals Microbes space exoplanets Mars Venus Earth science geology origins of life microbiology