Monthly Archives: February 2022

Twenty-five years ago today, a sheep named Dolly became the first animal to be cloned, using an adult somatic cell.

The Dolly experiment blew up in the news across the globe. It changed the world of stem cell research and on a more personal level, kept the institute that hosted the experiment alive.

"From a personal point of view, one of the most important things that came from Dolly was the survival of the research institute that I work in,"Alan Archibald, who was part of the 1996 experiment facilitated by the UK's Roslin Institute, told DW with a laugh.

"We were facing government cuts. And the money we made by selling the intellectual property to Dolly kept us going until we found alternative sources of money."

Dolly was cloned using a cell taken from another sheep's mammary gland. She was born in July 1996 with a white face a clear sign she'd been cloned, because if she'd been related to her surrogate mother, she'd have had a black face.

Researchers named her Dolly after Dolly Parton, who is known for her large "mammary glands"breasts.

Dolly was the only baby sheep to be born live out of a total of 277 cloned embryos.

She gave birth to six babies and died of lung disease at the age of six.

"It changed the scientific world's view about how flexible [cell] development was,"said Archibald. "There was a view that once a fertilized egg had developed into a multicellular animal, into liver cells and blood cells and brain cells, for thosecells, that was it, it was a dead end. There was no way back to alternative places for those cells to be. So the reprogramming that was critical to the Dolly experiment stood long-standing scientific dogma on its head."

Dolly's cloning helped lead to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of iPS cells by a team led by Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka.

This is likely the most important development in stem cell research to result from Dolly's cloning, Dr. Robin Lovell-Badge, who heads the Stem Cell Biology and Developmental Genetics Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London, told DW.

IPS cells offer a way to model human disease and are currently being used in biological research about premature aging, cancer and heart disease.

Dolly the sheep was cloned 25 years ago today

Additionally, Archibald said the genetically modified heart that was used in the world's first pig-to-human heart transplant procedure in January was created using Dolly's technology.

Although a human embryo was successfully cloned in 2013, there's been no progress made so far to clone an entire human being.

But monkeys have been replicated: in China, Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua became the first primates to be cloned using the Dolly technique in January 2018.

Out of nearly 150 cloned embryos, the monkeys' surrogate mothers were the only ones to deliver live babies.

Some progress has also been made to clone animals on the verge of extinction. USresearchers successfully cloned the black footed ferret in 2021 and the endangered Przewalski's horse in 2020.

Efforts are currently underway to clone the wooly mammoth, the giant panda and the northern white rhino.

This woolly miracle started out in a test tube and was born on July 5, 1996, to three mothers - one provided the egg, the second the DNA and the third was the surrogate. Dolly was the world's first mammal cloned from an adult cell. The sheep that made history lived to be six, when she was put down after developing a lung disease. Dolly is on display at Edinburgh's National Museum of Scotland.

Idaho Gem is the very first cloned mule. Born in 2003 in - you guessed it - a town in Idaho, he is an identical genetic copy of his champion racing mule brother. Idaho Gem lived up to expectations and became a successful racing mule. Tougher and more productive than horses, mules are a - usually sterile - cross between a female horse and a male donkey.

The world's first cloned pet was a cat. The Texas scientists who created the clone in 2001 called the furball CC, for carbon copy. Commercial pet cloning hasn't taken off, however, much to the dismay of devoted pet owners.

Noel, Angel, Star, Joy and Mary were born on Christmas Day 2001 at PPL Therapeutics - which is the company that helped make Dolly the sheep: The five healthy female piglet clones, PPL said, had the genetic capability to allow their organs to be transferred to the human body without being rejected.

Injaz ("Achievement") is the first cloned female dromedary, that is one-hump, camel. The gangly Arabian camel was born in 2009 at the Camel Reproduction Center in Dubai. Used for transport, riding and racing, camels still play an important role today in the Persian Gulf society.

Spanish scientists cloned a fighting bull they named Got. In this 2010 photo, the little fellow, cloned from the tough fighting bull Vasito, doesn't look ferocious yet at all. Got's mom was a serene black and white milk cow surrogate.

Unlike Dolly, who was created using a procedure called nuclear transfer, little Tetra the rhesus macaque was created through a technique called embryo splitting. In 2000, scientists in Oregon presented the little primate they had successfully cloned for the first time. Above, Tetra, which means four in Greek, is four months old.

A team of researchers in South Korea managed to clone the first canine in 2005: the Afghan hound Snuppy. In 2014, a biotech company based in Seoul cloned another dog, this one from a 12-year-old dachshund that belongs to a caterer in London who won the procedure in a competition. The result: Mini-Winnie. Experts, however, warn of cloning pets, arguing the animals won't necessarily be the same.

Author: Dagmar Breitrenbach

Along with cell-cloning's ability to study diseases, animal cloning allows major industry farms to produce more food.

The USFood and Drug Administration allows the cloning of cattle, pigs and goats and their offspring for the production of meat and milk. In 2008, the agency said the food is as safe as food derived from non-cloned animals and thus doesn't need to be labeled.

Dolly's body is now on display at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh

It's unclear how much meat and milk derived from cloned animals is sold in US markets.

The practice isn't allowed in Europe in 2015, the European Parliament voted to ban the cloning of all farm animals.

But that doesn't mean lab experiments aren't being facilitated on EU grounds, said Lovell-Badge.

"The field where the cloning procedures are actively being pursued (including in Germany) is for agricultural animals as a way to help generate or propagate pigs or cattle with valuable genetic characteristics,"he told DW.

For example, he said, cells from an animal could be edited by scientists. Then the cloning methods could be used to derive animals carrying the new genetic trait, such as disease resistance, or to make them more suitable as organ donors for humans.

A small industry has been created around the cloning of pets. Examples include the company ViaGen in the US, Sinogene in China, and Sooam Biotech in South Korea.

Snuppy the dog was cloned in 2005 in South Korea, Garlic the cat in July 2019 in China, and USsinger Barbra Streisand's Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett after her dog Samantha died in 2017.

"The justification for doing this is to replace a lost much-loved pet',"said Lovell-Badge. "However, this is nonsense."

Dolly's cloning accelerated stem cell research

He said that although it's true that the cloned animal will essentially have the same genomic DNA as the original pet, animals "aren't simply a product of [their] DNA."

Even if the cloning is successful, an animal's nature is partly determined by its genes, but also by its environment, which means a clone will never be the exact same as the original animal, he said.

Archibald added that although cloning technology is more efficient now than when Dolly was made, the process is still pretty inefficient.

"You would need a lot of female individuals to lay the eggs that would be used in the process,"he said.

Excerpt from:

25 years of Dolly: Whats become of the worlds first cloned sheep? - Deutsche Welle

Company deploys Veritone synthetic voice technology

By RW Staff Published: February 20, 2022

iHeartMedia plans to use cloned voices to translate and produce podcasts, hoping to reach new markets.

It announced this week that it will use technology from AI software company Veritone for this purpose.

iHeartMedia will leverage Veritones AI platform to make more shows across the iHeartPodcast Network available in multiple languages, helping to expand their podcast market, they said in the announcement. The first use case is to translate iHearts marquee podcasts for Spanish-speaking audiences.

[Related: Veritone Ramps Up Synthetic Voices]

They quoted Veritone President Ryan Steelberg saying, iHeartMedia will not only be able to scale to new markets with localized language translations but retain the brand value of their top talents voice, which is fundamental in podcasting. We are also partnering to develop synthetic voices for advertising and engaging content while reducing time-to-market and production costs for radio, podcasting and the metaverse.

The companies said iHeart voice talent will be able to authorize Veritones synthetic voice solution to produce more podcasts, ads and additional audio in multiple languages with the same energy, cadence and uniqueness of top talent.

[Related: Create Synthetic VOs Just by Typing]

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iHeart Will Use Voice Cloning to Amplify Podcasts - Radio World

Y: If youve seen a grove of quaking aspen, youll recall trees with smooth, grey-white bark fissured with black streaks and flat leaves of green and yellow that shimmer with the lightest breeze.

D: A forest canopy of quaking aspen is often dense where sunlight is plentiful because theyre intolerant of shade. This growing pattern allows quaking aspen to colonize large swaths of land, with individual trees of fairly uniform arrangement, size, distribution, and health quality. We call this community of trees a stand.

Y: A stand of quaking aspen may account for an extensive plot or just a minor part of a larger forest, sure to crowd out conifers or shrubs that attempt to invade its space. When one aspen tree falls, often another will quickly take its place and sprout from its roots, rather than a seed.

D: Aspen grow aggressively and take advantage over shade-loving plants to repopulate their own stands. While relatively few of its seeds will become established, an aspen can regenerate individual trees by shoots along its long, lateral roots. A single root system can reproduce hundreds of individual trees in this wayeach one genetically identical to the parent tree.

Y: A group of aspens with a single root system is called a clone. Clones can be less than an acre or up to 100 acres in size. These single organisms become immense and live much longer than any one tree could.

D: Individual aspen often dont live beyond 150 years or so; while a clone can live for generations. The Pando Clone of Utah is one prime example, having outlasted its conifer competitors for the span of many eras.

Original post:

The cloning and quaking stand of aspen | A Moment of Science - Indiana Public Media

US authorities have detected an increase in SIM swapping cases. It is a fraud based on social engineering that allows criminal acts to be committed.

That is why it is important to know it, to know how it works and take a series of recommendations so as not to be a victim of a crime.

What is SIM swapping

SIM exchange or SIM swapping includes duplicate SIM card smartphone. The SIM card or Subscriber Identity Module in a mobile phone stores the customer access code and the phone number of the telephone company.

This organization used techniques such as phishing and the smishing (via SMS) to impersonate a trusted person or company to obtain information from the victim, such as password, credit card data or copies of identity documents.

Then, with this information, they communicated with the telephone company pretending to be legitimate users and in this way obtain a new SIM card with the same telephone number.

How are SIM cards duplicated?

The danger of SIM swapping is that you do not need physical access to the mobile device to clone the SIM card. To do this, the cyber criminals they contact the customer service of telephone operators and pose as legitimate users.

If successful, you will get a new SIM card and you will be able to access sensitive information stored on it (contacts, passwords, bank details, etc.). In this way, they will hijack the victims phone line and use all their information, such as requesting a new password and obtaining a verification code to access your online banking.

How to know if you are a victim of SIM-swapping

Camilo Gutirrez Amaya, head of the ESET research laboratory for Latin America, explains that the first sign is the loss of network signal in mobile phones. In fact, when criminals activate SIM cards in their devices, traffic from legitimate users is automatically disabled.

On Latin America This problem also exists. On ArgentinaIn 2021 and so far in 2020, several cases have been reported of victims who say they have suffered money theft as a result of the cloning of the chip.

Last month, for example, a person lost the money they had deposited in their bank account after accessing a Procrear credit. In November 2021, another case was known in which criminals stole access to WhatsApp and social media What Instagram and Facebook.

How to prevent duplicate SIM card

In order to avoid duplication of SIM rates, practice the following tips (and the sooner the better):

Companies do not ask to share personal data by phone, text message services or email. In such situations, contacting the legal entity will help prevent potential scams.

In the event that there is an interruption of the abnormal telephone line, said irregularity must be brought to the attention of the company as soon as possible.

If possible, avoid two-factor authentication via SMS and use options like stand-alone authenticators instead.

Secure destruction of sensitive printed information to prevent SIM swapping and dumpster diving.

In addition, when contacting the operator, it is very important to ask to check the status of the SIM card.

Finally, any suspicious movement in an account must be reported to the bank immediately.

Do not use an easy-to-remember date or number as a PIN or verification code.

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How to prevent SIM Swapping, the scam that clones chips and gains access to bank accounts - D1SoftballNews.com