Latest news with #DollytheSheep
Daily Record
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Woolly Weekend returns to Lanarkshire's National Museum of Rural Life
The free family event features YouTube star and BBC Landward presenter Cammy Wilson demonstrating both traditional and modern sheep-shearing techniques. The National Museum of Rural Life is inviting visitors to flock to the East Kilbride attraction next weekend for its popular Woolly Weekend event. Families and visitors of all ages can enjoy a packed programme of activities on Saturday and Sunday, May 24 and 25, that shines a spotlight on countryside life and rural traditions. Highlights include weaving and spinning demonstrations and the chance to meet alpacas and rare breed sheep. The event, which is free with museum admission thanks to the support of players of People's Postcode Lottery, also features YouTube star and BBC Landward presenter Cammy Wilson demonstrating both traditional and modern sheep-shearing techniques. Families can enjoy storytelling and sheep-themed crafts and follow a Dolly the Sheep trail through the museum. Inside the galleries, they can explore Scotland's agricultural past through fascinating objects that tell the story of rural life and speak to local crafters who will be demonstrating how they work with wool. Over 200 lambs have already been born this spring at the museum's historic working farm, a short walk away. There, visitors can also see new calves, rare-breed Tamworth piglets, Ayrshire and Highland cattle, hens and the farm's much-loved Clydesdale horses Gina and Anna. The Georgian farmhouse and gardens can also be explored and offer a glimpse into the home life of farmers over 70 years ago. Vicky McLean, general manager, National Museum of Rural Life, said: 'Woolly Weekend is one of our most popular events and is a fantastic way to connect people with the skills, traditions and animal breeds that are such an important part of Scotland's rural heritage. From watching Cammy Wilson in action to seeing new-born lambs or learning how wool is transformed from fleece into fabric, it's a weekend packed with discovery and delight for the whole family.' Woolly Weekend at the National Museum of Rural Life runs from 10.30am till 15.30pm. The Gourmet Street Food van will be in the picnic field on both days and the Thorntonhall ice cream van will also offer delicious treats for visitors to enjoy. *Don't miss the latest headlines from around Lanarkshire. Sign up to our newsletters here.
Boston Globe
08-04-2025
- Science
- Boston Globe
Scientists say they ‘brought back' dire wolves from extinction. Not exactly.
Other scientists, however, say that while Colossal's technological feats are impressive, the animals are not truly dire wolves and that the process has raised a raft of ethical issues. Advertisement 'The reality is we can't de-extinct extinct creatures because we can't use cloning — the DNA is just not well enough preserved,' said Nicolas Rawlence, an associate professor and director of the Palaeogenetics Laboratory at New Zealand's University of Otago. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In a phone interview Tuesday, he said Colossal's pups are not dire wolves, but gray wolves that have had part of their genome changed to look like dire wolves. 'What Colossal is trying to do is genetically engineering animals to look like extinct creatures,' he said. 'They look cute and cuddly but … they're not a dire wolf.' Pontus Skoglund, leader of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at Britain's Francis Crick Institute, said in a post on Bluesky that he was 'not necessarily against the initiative, but would a chimpanzee with 20 gene edits be human? … These individuals seem optimistically 1/100,000th dire wolf.' Advertisement Video posted on Colossal's social media showed two of the white fluffy pups, Romulus and Remus, practicing their howls. Romulus and Remus are the names of the mythical founders of Rome, who were raised by a wolf. Dire wolves will also be familiar to fans of 'Game of Thrones,' the hit television show, which features several of the animals. The name of the other pup, Khaleesi, appears in the 'Game of Thrones' TV and book series, which also depicts dire wolves. The 'dire wolf' pups are the latest headline-grabbing claim from the bioscience venture, founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard geneticist George Church, which says it is working to bring back some of the world's most famous extinct species. In its sights are the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, which it aims to reengineer for the modern world. It has already created mice with hair like a woolly mammoth, and aims to conserve ancient traits as part of what it says are broader efforts to preserve the world's biodiversity. The company has been valued at $10.2 billion and raised $435 million in funding, including $200 million announced in January. Colossal's chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, said in a statement on the company's website that the birth of the pups shows 'we are one step closer to a world in which these tools are among those at our disposal to help species thrive in their rapidly changing habitats.' Shapiro previously told The Washington Post that the company was not trying to clone animals in the same way that had been done with Dolly the Sheep. 'We're not trying to make something that's identical to a dodo,' Shapiro said about the company's efforts to create a dodo-like bird using the DNA of a pigeon. 'We're trying to create something that's able to behave like a dodo would on that landscape in some key, functional way. So a large, flightless bird that wanders around and eats fruits and spreads the seeds,' she said. Advertisement Some scientists are dismissive of the claims and wary of the company's approach, even while expressing admiration for the technological accomplishments of its CRISPR gene-editing techniques, in which a piece of DNA can be snipped out from a genome and precisely replaced. In the wolves' case, scientists edited the gray wolf genome to approximate the size, color, and coat of a dire wolf, Rawlence said. 'There are about 19,000 genes in that genome. They looked at all the differences and said there are 20 key differences in 14 key genes that they could change to make a gray wolf look like a dire wolf,' he said. 'Their technology is amazing, but my personal view is it needs to be used to conserve the animals we've got left,' he said. That could include using money the company has raised to manage existing endangered species, or reintroduce genetic diversity among existing species to help them adapt to climate change or diseases. He said trying to recreate the characteristics of extinct animals provides no incentive to conserve species in the first place, and raises concerns about where and how the animals will live. 'Is there even going to be the habitat? How are you going to deal with increased human-wolf conflict? What's going to happen when your genetically engineered gray wolves hybridize with other gray wolves?' he said. Advertisement He also raised concerns about how a species could survive with just three members and said 'at least 500 individuals' would be needed to ensure a genetically diverse population. He also raised ethical concerns: Will extinction companies trademark these creatures? Who owns them? These are all discussions we need to have, he said. Colossal did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday morning.
