The Mammoth Cometh
NYMagazine via @shouhart
By NATHANIEL RICH - FEB. 27, 2014
►http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/magazine/the-mammoth-cometh.html (déjà recensé par @fil évidemment, ça m’apprendra à avoir du retard de @7h36)
The earth is about to become a lot less “natural.” Biologists have already created new forms of bacteria in the lab, modified the genetic code of countless living species and cloned dogs, cats, wolves and water buffalo, but the engineering of novel vertebrates — of breathing, flying, defecating pigeons — will represent a milestone for synthetic biology. This is the fact that will overwhelm all arguments against de-extinction. Thanks, perhaps, to “Jurassic Park,” popular sentiment already is behind it.
D’ici 2060, le retour des pigeons voyageurs ! C’est donc l’ambition du projet Revive & Restore, propulsé par Stewart Brand et sa femme Ryan Phelan, « an entrepreneur who founded an early consumer medical-genetics company ».
Et bientôt :
Besides the woolly mammoth, candidates include the black-footed ferret, the Caribbean monk seal, the golden lion tamarin, the ivory-billed woodpecker and the northern white rhinoceros, a species that is down to its final handful of members.
Et le « western black rhino » déjà éteint, alors ?
▻http://seenthis.net/messages/171749
Feraient bien de se hâter :
Scientists predict that changes made by human beings to the composition of the atmosphere could kill off a quarter of the planet’s mammal species, a fifth of its reptiles and a sixth of its birds by 2050.
Et qui dit Brand dit Long Now Foundation. Dans l’article il est aussi question du disque Rosetta — qui fait partie du Rosetta Project ▻http://rosettaproject.org — embarqué dans la sonde du même nom :
a disk of pure nickel inscribed with 1,500 languages that has been mounted on the Rosetta space probe, which this year is scheduled to land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, 500 million miles from earth.
Aux dernières nouvelles, tout se passe bien dans l’#espace, @simplicissimus veille :
▻http://seenthis.net/messages/208339
▻http://seenthis.net/messages/220256