Category Archives: Cloning

"It's incredible. It's also incredibly dysfunctional."Perfect Clones

In news thats emerged straight from your nightmares, scientists have discovered a subspecies of bees that can create perfect clones of itself and uses those clones to invade rival bee hives.

Scientists discovered that a female South African Cape honeybee doesnt reshuffle its DNA when it lays an egg, according to Live Science. This allows it to create perfect clones of itself every time it reproduces, rendering it virtually immortal. Scientists even discovered one bee in this subspecies that has produced millions of clones over the past three decades alone.

Researchers studying this unsettling phenomenon published a paper of their findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Its incredible. Its also incredibly dysfunctional, said Benjamin Oldroyd, lead author of the study and a professor of behavioral genetics at the University of Sydney, to Live Science.

Oldroyd is right to be surprised. Asexual reproduction isnt unusual when it comes to insects. When it happens though, the parents DNA is typically mixed up during a process called recombination. So even though the offspring has just one parent, their genetic makeup is different.

But thats not the case with the South African Cape honeybee, which seems to just be creating a perfect copy of its DNA every time it reproduces.

The bees actually pose a bit of a problem for its own colony and rival bee hives. Thats because in typical colonies, only the queen is able to reproduce. If the worker bees are able to create offspring, the hives become dysfunctional.

Eventually the workers just sort of hang around laying eggs not doing any work, Oldroyd said to New Scientist. The colony dies, and [the cloning workers] spread to the next colony.

According to Oldroyd, this phenomena kills off roughly 10 percent of South African bee colonies each year and is like a transmissible social cancer.

READ MORE: Single bee is making an immortal clone army thanks to a genetic fluke [Live Science]

More on clones: Chinese Scientists Cloned Gene-Edited Monkeys with Horrifying Results

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A Single Bee Has Created an Immortal Army with Millions of Clones - Futurism

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A little while ago in the Krakoan X-Men comic book Hellions, when Madelyne Pryor died, we discovered a new policy on the island of Krakoa. As part of the new X-Men status, mutants who die can be resurrected courtesy of Cerebro and The Five. But one of their rules is that they will not resurrect duplicates whether genetic, parallel dimensional versions of time travelling alternates.

Art from Hellions #4.We were first made aware of the policy from Krakoan's Quiet Council, after the death of Madelyne Pryor.

Time for Scott, her ex-husband to give the news her ex-boyfriend, his brother Alex

Got to lobe those Krakoan family trees. It didn't go down well.

In Cable, starring the son of Madelyne Pryor (told you), he has own issues, tracking down Stryfe, the clone of his future self who he killed, who is stealing mutant babies.

Which brought back memories of Inferno, when Madelyne Pryor and mutant babies were used by Mister Sinister, and some senior demons to bring Hell to Manhattan.

All the time that Sinister has been disobeying the No More Clones rule with himself and we know he has other secret cloning-related plans with chimera as well.

And as a result of these rules, neither Madelyne Pryor or her child, the adult Cable, were allowed to be brought back from the dead with the rest, even as Teen Cable tries to make the latter happen.

X-Factor were tasked with establishing Proof of Death before reviving someone, so to avoid having multiple versions of the same person and soul -running around. Though we still reckon that happened with Laura Kinney and Old Woman Wolverine in X-Men. Did Laura Kinnery really die in the Vault? Was the younger version of herself resurrected without her Vault memories and now a member of the new X-Men team, at some point have to face a version of herself that has lasted centuries?

But there still seems to be some wiggle room. In Wolverine #12, The Five resurrect Logan even though he hasn't died. Just a version of him without a soul or a brain. And naturally Gabby, herself a clone of Laura Kinney, has some concerns in New Mutants as well.

With a little more pushback than Havok was able to give.

There's also concerns in Cable regarding Stryfe's plans being similar to those that started Inferno, and Majik checks there too.

While in the most recent New Mutants, we discovered that Gabby had, herself, mysteriously died on the island of Krakoa, at the end of the Hellfire Gala.

With the question as to would she be revived under Krakoan laws against reviving clones? And could the revival of Laura Kinney as Wolverine, when Old Woman Wolverine inevitably turns up, underline the issues here? In today's Cable #12 however, Teen Cable makes the case

finally gets his way. And Old Man Cable is revived.

With a couple of mentions for everyone watching Loki at the moment and wondering about the TVA.

Also The Summers War againsgt Stryfe? And that it all may be heading to an early Inferno. As Stryfe has been doing his own cloning, far away from Krakoa.

We presumed that the new Inferno from Jonathan Hickman and Valerio Schiti would be a very different ebast to the original Inferno, more about Mystique burning down Krakoa. Could there also be a more.. traditional bent to it as well?

CABLE #11MARVEL COMICSMAR210592(W) Gerry Duggan (A/CA) Phil NotoSUMMERS END!Some summers seem like they will never end. And some end too soon.Rated T+In Shops: Jun 30, 2021 SRP: $3.99

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Cable, Krakoan Clones And Setting Up An Early Inferno? (Spoilers) - Bleeding Cool News

In the episode, The Bad Batch finally solves one of its most intriguing mysteries: the origin of Omega, a young, blond clone who obviously doesnt look like the rest of her people (not to mention that shes a girl, while all of the other clones are male). But her appearance isnt the only special thing about her. We also learn that shes an unmodified clone created from Jango Fetts DNA just like Boba Fett! Even her name ties into Jango Fetts clone son, who was originally designated the code name Alpha before the bounty hunter named him. Yes, Omega is sort of Boba Fetts sisterfrom a certain point of view.

Its Tech who reveals the truth to his companions after studying Omegas DNA more closely: I further analyzed Omegas genetic profile and discovered she has pure, first-generation DNA, he says in the episode. All clones were created from a host named Jango Fett. While our genetic structure was modified for growth and acceleration and obedience, Omega is a pure genetic replication.

Therefore, since the Kaminoans have lost track of Boba in the years since the Clone Wars started, Omega is the only remaining source of Jangos original DNA, the key to creating more Gen 1 clones and restoring the Clone Army to its glory days.

Earlier episodes allude to the fact that so many generations of clones have been created from Fetts DNA at this point that the original genetic strain has been stretched too thin, resulting in mutations in the line as opposed to 1:1 copies of the Gen 1 clones. The rogue-ish Bad Batch, for example, are the result of these mutations.

Recovering Omegas DNA would allow the Kaminoans to restore its line of Jango Fett clones to their purest form, which Lama Su believes will put his cloning facility back in the Empires good graces. He hires bounty hunter Cad Bane to recover the asset and bring her back to Kamino so that he can extract a sample of her DNA and terminate her.

But not all Kaminoans agree that this is the right course of action. Chief medical scientist Nala Se, one of the key engineers of the clone army, has hatched her own plan to save Omega, whom she feels protective of despite her beliefs in The Clone Wars that clones are disposable. It seems that Nala Se has had a change of heart.

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Star Wars: The Bad Batch Reveals the Fate of an Attack of the Clones Character - Den of Geek

(Crucial P5)

If you're still using a traditional, spinning hard disk on your PC, you're missing out. Swapping it out for a solid-state drive (SSD) is one of the best upgrades you can make in terms of speeding up your computer. It'll boot faster, programs will launch instantly, and games won't take so long to load anymore.

You could reinstall Windows from scratch, and in some situations, that may be preferablebut with the right tools, you can get up and running much quicker by copying your entire drive over to the new SSD.

Obviously, in order to upgrade to an SSD, you'll need to, well, buy an SSD. We have some recommendations, but if you're on a budget, we have a separate list of cheap SSDs as well. Make sure to buy the right form factor for your computer (some laptops will use 2.5-inch drives, while others might use M.2 or mSATA drives), and get one big enough to fit all your data. If you have a 500GB hard drive now, you should probably spring for a similarly sized SSD (or larger, to accommodate future data).

The only exception is if you're on a desktop computer and have room for multiple hard drives. In that case, you could store Windows and your programs on the SSD while putting your music, movies, and other media on a second, larger hard diskthough this can be a bit more complicated, as we'll discuss below.

During this process, you'll need both your SSD and your old hard drive connected to your computer at the same time. If you're using a laptop with only one hard drive slot, that means you'll need an external adapter, dock, or enclosure that can connect your bare SSD to your computer over USB. (Again, desktop users may not need this if they have room for two drives inside their PCyou can just install it internally alongside your old hard drive.)

There are many different drive-cloning tools on the market, and unfortunately there's no free, one-size-fits-all option. If your drive manufacturer offers a migration program, that might be your best bet. For example, if you bought a Samsung SSD, we recommend downloading Samsung Data Migration and following the instructions in the user guide. Western Digital and SanDisk users can use WD's version of Acronis True Image to copy their data using these instructions.

For this guide, we'll be using Macrium Reflectit's a free drive-cloning tool that works with any brand of hard drive and SSD. Just download the installer for the free home version and run through the wizard to get it up and running on your PC. It's available to anyone, no matter what brand drive you have, so if your drive manufacturer doesn't offer a migration tool, Macrium Reflect is your next best bet.

Once you've gathered your necessities, it's time to get started.

Before you start messing with drives and formatting partitions, it's absolutely necessary to back up your data first. An accidental click can result in you erasing everything, so do not continue until you've backed it all up.

If you don't have a backup yet, check out our favorite software for the job. Windows also has File History for backing up important documents, and an image file can save your entire system. Copying important data to an external hard drive will also do in a pinch.

If you're upgrading to an SSD that's smaller than your current hard drive, you'll want to take extra care here. This isn't as common as it once was, thanks to bigger, less expensive SSDs, but if that's the case for you, you'll need to delete some files and free up space on your hard drive before cloning it. Otherwise, your data won't fit on the new drive. Once your data is safe and secure, continue to the next step.

Plug your SSD into the SATA-to-USB adapter, then plug that into your computer. If it's a brand-new drive, you probably won't see the drive pop up in File Explorer, but don't worry; it just needs to be initialized first. Open the Start menu and type "partitions" in the search box. Click the Create and format hard disk partitions option, and Disk Management will open. It will prompt you to initialize the drive using either the GPT or MBR partition table.

I'll be using GPT for my SSD, since I have a modern PC with a UEFI firmware. If you have an older PC with a traditional BIOS, you may need to use an MBR partition table. If you aren't sure, look up your specific model of PC or motherboard to see which type of firmware it uses.

If you aren't prompted to initialize the drive, and don't see it in Disk Management, double-check that it's properly connected to your computer, and that the enclosure or dock is powered on (if necessary). See our guide to troubleshooting a hard drive that won't show up for more.

Once the drive has been initialized, you should see the drive show up in the bottom pane of Disk Management as unallocated space. From there, you should be good to go.

Open Macrium Reflect and you should see a list of drives in the main window. Find your current driveit'll list your C: partition with a Windows logoand select it. Click the Clone This Disk button that appears below that drive to start the cloning wizard.

This will bring up a new window where you will choose your destination drivein this case, your empty SSD. If your SSD is the same size as your old drive, make sure the box all the way to the left of your source disk is checked, as shown above, then click Select a Disk to Clone. Choose your SSD from the drop-down list, and click Next.

If your SSD is significantly smaller than your old drive, this may require an extra step. Reflect will attempt to automatically shrink partitions with free space to fit it all on the drive, but in my experience, it doesn't always do this intelligently, and may leave out one of Windows' recovery partitions. If you experience this problem, you can manually drag each partition down to the SSD, and click Cloned Partition Properties on your main C: drive to resize it manually.

If your SSD is larger than your old drive, it may leave some unused space on the drivein which case you'll want to select your main partition, click Cloned Partition Properties, and expand the drive to fill that empty space.

Click Next and you'll be asked if you want to save this backup schedule. You can uncheck that box and click OK to run the backup now, one time. This can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on how large the disks are, so go watch Netflix and come back later.

When its done, you can exit Macrium Reflect. You should see your new SSD in File Explorer, complete with all your data.

Next, shut down your computer. It's time to install that SSD in your machine permanently. If you have a laptop with only one hard drive slot, you'll need to remove your old hard drive and replace it with your SSD. This is a bit different on every laptop.

If you have a desktop PC with more than one hard drive slot, you can leave your old hard drive in as extra storage, and just install your SSD alongside it.

Once you're finished installing the SSD, you'll need to tell your computer to boot from it. (This may not be necessary on laptops with just one drive, but if you experience problems booting, it can help on some PCs.) Turn your computer on and enter its BIOS/UEFI setupthis is a bit different on every PC, but it'll usually say something like "Press DEL to enter setup" on the boot screen, so you'll want to press the corresponding key as it starts up.

From there, look for your BIOS's boot options. These will be in a different spot depending on your computer, but once you find them, select the option to change the boot sequence. Choose your SSD from the list as the first boot drive, then head back to the BIOS's main menu to exit, saving your settings.

Your computer will reboot, and if all went well, it should plop you back into Windows faster than ever before. Open File Explorer and check to confirm that your SSD is, in fact, the C: drive. If everything looks good, you're ready to rock.

If your old drive is still installed, you can erase it and use it to store extra files, or you can disconnect it entirely. Best of all, your computer should feel significantly snappier without having to start from scratch.

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How to Copy Your Windows Installation to an SSD - PCMag

Noida: A 45-year-old Bulgarian national was among three people arrested by the Noida police on Sunday for allegedly cloning ATM cards and withdrawing money.

The suspects were identified as Ruslen (the alleged mastermind who is from Bulgaria), and Ravikar and Komal from Bihar. Police said the three were living in a rented accommodation at a highrise in Sector 75. They were nabbed from Sector 18 following a tip-off from an informant.

According to police officials, Ruslen had come to India on May 10, 2019 on a tourist visa and was sent to Tihar jail within a couple of weeks allegedly in connection with a cyber crime. He allegedly met Ravi in jail who was lodged there in connection with a murder case. Ruslen was released on February 1, 2021 after which he had started living in Noida.

He holds a diploma in electronics and is well-versed with cloning technology. He himself prepared the circuits and skimmers, parts for which were ordered from a spy goods website, said additional deputy commissioner of police, zone 1, Kumar Ranvijay Singh.

Police said the group allegedly would install the skimmer devices and mini cameras at unmanned ATM kiosks across the National Capital Region. They would collect the data of users, clone their ATM cards and then withdraw money from their bank accounts.

There are more people associated with the operation, including other foreign nationals, and we are working to trace them. The total amount skimmed by the suspects is being verified through bank account details, though it is suspected to be in lakhs, said a senior police official, on condition of anonymity.

Police recovered 28 cloned cards along with laptops, phones, seven skimmer boards, a camera, card readers, a hard drive, several pen drives, multiple tools and other electronic gadgets. The suspects were produced before a magistrate and later sent to jail.

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Foreign national among three held for cloning ATM cards in Noida - Hindustan Times

Hives of the African lowland honeybee (Apis mellifera scutella) collapse because of an unseeable inner threat: the growing, immortal clone army of a rival bee subspecies.

(Photo : Getty Images)

That army is attainable because the South African Cape honeybee (Apis mellifera capensis) - the female workers of the rival subspecies - can make perfect copies of themselves, with one individual discovered to have done this millions of times in the past three decades. With this continual-cloning ability, the Cape honeybees creep into the hives of their lowland honeybee rivals and churn out replica after replica (no need for a queen).

Unfortunately, these clones are freeloaders, refusing to do any work. Now, a new study has disclosed the genetic foundations of the bizarre and formidable adaptation. Different from most animals, and even their own queen, the female workers do not rearrange the DNA of the eggs they lay.

This enables the workers to constantly recreate a perfect replica of themselves - a clone - every time they reproduce. The bypassing of this DNA-reshuffling process is different from anything they've ever seen, according to the researchers.

Also Read:Modern Pesticides' Harmful Effects on Bees Worsened in the Last Decade

A professor of behavioral genetics at the University of Sydney, lead author Benjamin Oldroyd told Live Science, "It's incredible. It's also incredibly dysfunctional," making reference to the fact that reshuffling is usually needed to hold chromosomes together during the egg-making process. "Yet, they've managed to still lay eggs somehow. It's insane; I've not heard of anything like this before, anywhere."

Honeybee workers and other social insects are capable of reproducing through a form of asexual reproduction known as thelytokous parthenogenesis, in which females produce female progenies from unfertilized eggs. Every time she creates offspring, the single-parent worker bee will clone the chromosomes she got from her parents (a queen and a male drone) into four.

Next, she takes the genetic material from all four chromosomes, rearrange it and makes four chromosomes with that mixed-up DNA through a process known as recombination. This reshuffling assures that, even with just a single parent, future offspring will be genetically different.

(Photo : Getty Images)

However, as just two chromosomes out of the four are selected and no new genetic material is contributed by a sexual partner, this causes an average loss of one-third of genetic diversity each time the shuffling is performed, or every generation, Oldroyd said.

Following just a few generations of parthenogenetic reproduction, the piled-up loss of genetic material causes levels of genetic diversity that are low enough to be deadly.Most social insects, therefore, depend on a queen that breeds sexually on their behalf.

In return, the genetically diverse workers maintain the health of the colony and safeguard the offspring of their closely related siblings and cousins.

Related Article:A Third of US Bee Colony Died Last Year, Here's Why It Is Still Good News

For more news, updates about bees and similar topics don't forget to follow Nature World News!

2021 NatureWorldNews.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Single Bee Clone Itself Millions of Times Over the Past Three Decades - Nature World News

Scientists have discovered that a subspecies of South African honeybee is comprised of millions of clones from a single honeybee, thanks to a bizarre genetic jackpot.

For over three decades, the growing army of clones has been found to be a serious threat to the hives of the South African honeybee. Sky Newsreported that 10% of hives are collapsing each year due to the colonies being filled with the clones that consume their resources but refuse to share in the work.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)A small African Honey Bee about to alight and collect pollen from a Leonotis leonurus (Wild dagga) plant in South Africa.

A subspecies of South African honeybees can clone themselves and create more bees like them. Genetic analysis reveals that their cloning habit began on a single honeybee in 1990 that clones itself successfully and produces queens that can take over the hive, according to New Scientist.

The process of asexual reproduction or parthenogenesisis common in lower plants or animals, like ants, aphids, wasps, and bees. However, having an offspring that is identical to the parent is uncommon because genetic material is often mixed up in a process called recombination that could result in an offspring with a slightly different genetic makeup.

It was previously known as the subspecies of Cape honeybee (Apis mellifera capensis) that are capable of creating a perfect copy of itself, according to Benjamin Oldroyd of the University of Sydney.

He added that creating clones that are a perfect copy of the parent could be beneficial as asexual reproduction could often be lethal because one-third of the genes become inbred. But since the Cape honeybee workers are a perfect clone, they remain genetically healthy as their mother.

ALSO READ: Bees at Work: Watch How They Join Forces to Unscrew Soda Bottle

"It's incredible. It's also incredibly dysfunctional," Oldroyd told Live Science,referring to the DNA reshuffling method necessary to hold chromosomes together during the egg-making process of the honeybees that clone themselves. "Yet, somehow they've managed to do it [still lay eggs]. It's insane, I've not heard of anything like this before, anywhere".

The generations of parthenogenic reproduction have accumulated to the loss of genetic material that led to low levels of genetic diversity that are lethal. Most social insects rely on their queen to reproduce, while workers help maintain the colony and protect the brood.

But in the Cape honeybee's case, workers do not work because they can asexually reproduce. Oldroyd said that these bees seemed to develop a dysfunctional attitude that leads to the collapse of the hive. He compared it to cells in a tumor in which it does not matter whether the clones are healthy, as long as there is enough of them to exploit the host.

The single lineage of Cape honeybee workers that take part in this parasitic behavior is responsible for the collapse of 10% of South African honeybee colonies every year.

RELATED ARTICLE:New Study Sheds Light on the Reproductive Lives of Honey Bees

Check out more news and information on Beeson Science Times.

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Single Honeybee Created Millions of Clones Itself, Threatening Colony's Health - Science Times

If theres one thing most Star Wars fans can agree on, its that the sequel trilogy Episode VII The Force Awakens (2015), Episode VIII The Last Jedi (2017), and Episode IX The Rise of Skywalker (2019) left much to be desired. One of the biggest issues with the movies was the sheer existence of Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), who seemingly appeared out of nowhere and whose origin was never clearly explained, other than serving as a placeholder for Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).

Enter The Mandalorian.

Related:Dave Filoni Just Foreshadowed Grogu and The Mandalorian

Ever since Season 1 of the hit streaming series, showrunner Jon Favreau and executive producer Dave Filoni have been doing everything in their power to fix the Star Wars sequels Snoke problem.

During the first season, viewers saw Doctor Pershing (Omid Abtahi) draw blood from Grogu (AKA Baby Yoda), setting up the lab that Greef Karga (Carl Weathers), Cara Dune (Gina Carano), and bounty hunter Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) discover at the supposedly abandoned Imperial base on Nevarro in Season 2, Episode 4 (Chapter 12: Sanctuary).

Related:Reported NEW Luke Skywalker Series Gets Timeline!

The trio, plus much-maligned Mythrol (Horatio Sanz), soon discover that the base is not operating with a skeleton crew at all, and chaos ensues as it generally tends to in The Mandalorian and they ultimately stumble upon the aforementioned lab under the direction of Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito).

Related:Did Qui-Gon & Obi-Wan Change the Chosen One?

The group discovers a transmission from Doctor Pershing, in which he says:

Replicated the results of the subsequent trials, which also resulted in catastrophic failure. There were promising effects for an entire fortnight, but then sadly, the body rejected the blood. I highly doubt we will find a donor with a higher M-count [midichlorian count] though. I recommend that we suspend all experimentation. I fear that the volunteer will meet the same regrettable fate if we proceed with the transfusion. Unfortunately, we have exhausted our initial supply of blood. The Child is small and I was only able to harvest a limited amount without killing him. If these experiments are to continue as requested, we would again require access to the donor. I will not disappoint you again, Moff Gideon.

Related:Star Wars Just Teased Grogus Existence Almost 30 Years Earlier

Now, Filoni is using his latest Star Wars project, animated series Star Wars: The Bad Batch to set up Season 3 of The Mandalorian. Episode 9 of the Star Wars: The Clone Wars spinoff (Bounty Lost) saw first-generation Jango Fett clone, Omega, travel to an abandoned Kaminoan cloning facility on planet Boro Vio.

The female clone is in the company of bounty hunter Cad Bane (Corey Burton), who stole her away from Clone Force 99 Hunter, Wrecker, Tech, and Echo on Bracca in Episode 8 (Reunion), much like how Moff Gideons Dark Trooper squad took Grogu from Djarin on Tython in The Mandalorian Season 2, Episode 6 (Chapter 13: The Tragedy).

Related:The Mandalorian Just Connected Grogu to Ben Solo

Ironically, one character, Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) appears in both Bounty Lost and The Tragedy. Filoni, in fact, used a scene between Shand and Omega to set up what is likely to happen in the third season of The Mandalorian.

As Inverse noted:

While on that planet [Boro Vio], Omega [with Shand] comes face to face with tanks full of rejected cloning experiments. The tank is too cloudy to see the creatures in detail, but concept art [below] from the episode reveals some truly gruesome Eldritch horrors of cloning experiments gone wrong.

Related:Star Wars Just Unraveled Everything We Knew About Boba Fett

Since The Bad Batch is geared at both adults and a younger audience, its likely that the series wont explore the atrocities of cloning experiments gone wrong in great detail. As Inverses article proposed:

now that Moff Gideons Dark Troopers are destroyed, could his next weapon turn out to be some sort of terrifying clone? Are we about to see an army of Snokes in The Mandalorian Season 3?

Related:No More Grogu? The Mandalorian Might Get an Exciting New Best Friend

It seems that Favreau and Filoni are forging full steam ahead with their explanation of Supreme Leader Snoke, perhaps by introducing a truly intense form of biological warfare into The Mandalorian universe.

Related:Disney Might Finally Be Turning Its Back on Kathleen Kennedys Star Wars

If Moff Gideon does, in fact, use a deformed, Force-sensitive, Snoke-like clone as a weapon, it will go a long way toward tying the divisive JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson sequel trilogy into the Mando-verse, which is likely to be the most crucial part of the Star Wars franchise moving forward.

What do you think? Are we about to see a deformed clone used as a weapon now that Moff Gideon has lost the Darksaber?

Read more:

New 'Mandalorian' Weapon Will Make the 'Star Wars' Sequels Worth It Inside the Magic - Inside the Magic

MATSON, A TALL man who bounds around at high speed and wears three-quarter length shorts even when hes sporting a lab coat, says that he got into the artificial insemination business because he was in the right place at the right time. He dropped out of school at 16 and went straight into horse racing, first as a jockey. An unsuccessful foray into point-to-point racing and breeding followed, until an accident that caused the death of a mare pushed him towards the field of artificial insemination.

For over three decades, his focus was horse breeding and, later, cloning domestic animals for people who want to replace their beloved pets. Then, in 2018, he had a brainwave at a conference in the US, where he had struck up a partnership with cloning company Viagen to transfer frozen tissue through Europe more easily. I thought, if we can do that with cats and dogs and horses, why can't we do this with rare breeds?

When he first approached Chester Zoo with his idea, he says, they didnt quite slam the door in my face but werent interested in cloning for conservation. They said no, this is a bit too Frankenstein work, there has to be a certain line that you have to be careful not to cross. But that's all changed now.

Traditionally, zoos have wanted nothing to do with cloning, says Sue Walker, head of science at Chester Zoo and co-founder of Nature's SAFE. Cloning a single animal is expensive, has a high rate of failure, and may produce animals that are highly stressed, or die early. It is much better to concentrate on saving species from the extinction vortex through repopulation and habitat preservation schemes. But, as time runs out, and the chances for a species survival become more limited, artificial insemination and, in extreme cases, cloning may be the best or only option.

On a cold morning in March, Matson gives me a tour of his farm in Whitchurch, Shropshire. On the ground floor of the main building are cryogenic vats that store cell samples. The small ones look like milk churns; two large ones look like giant vats. When Matson climbs up onto a small step and opens one, billowing vapour streams out. Inside, floating around in designated compartments are thousands of tiny, cocktail straw-sized test tubes, each filled with race horse DNA.

This is liquid nitrogen, he says, poking his bare hand into the big cryogenic canister. This is minus-196 degrees, right? It suspends everything in animation. To preserve the cells, Matsons team mixes them with a cryoprotectant, which acts as a barrier to protect the biological tissue from freezing damage he likens it to antifreeze. Last year, he says, his company exported about 60,000 worth of semen to 21 different countries.

In the next room, Natures SAFE has a designated cryogenic canister: a yellow urn the size of a barstool, currently representing a much smaller portion of samples than the horse semen vats. Were definitely going to need more space, Matson says. We really are in a fight against time. In theory, we need 50 different samples for each species to keep going. Gathering at least 50 samples should give scientists sufficiently diverse genetic material to make a meaningful difference to an endangered species; if you cloned animals from the same sample, they would be genetically identical and therefore incapable of creating a viable population.

After touring the labs, Matson says he would like to show me the bread and butter of what takes place here. He leads me to an empty, roofed space. On the right, theres what looks like a big, square-ended vaulting horse, propped up at an angle. Behind it are two stables: one housing a rather quiet black mare, the second empty.

More here:

One man's plan to resurrect the animal species we can't save - Wired.co.uk

Sexual reproduction is the closest thing most living beings have to immortality. But there's a creature on this Earth who takes it one step closer to the ideal.

Worker honeybees of the South African variety can clone themselves, one of whom did so, many millions of times, for 30 years, according to a recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

This isn't, strictly speaking, eternal life. But it's the next best thing. And it's also deadly to the perfect order of a healthy beehive.

While asexual reproduction, also called parthenogenesis, is fairly common among insects, creating offspring that with identical genes to the parent isn't so common. The difference lies in how genetic material is typically mixed up during reproduction, in a biological process called recombination. This means that even in asexual reproduction, where only one parent is needed, the spawn's DNA is usually not the same. But female workers of the South African Cape honeybee (Apis mellifera capensis) have become capable of effectively cloning themselves without experiencing the changes typically seen in reproduction. "It's quite remarkable," said the University of Sydney's Benjamin Oldroyd, in a New Scientist report.

And there are benefits to cloning oneself to create offspring. In ordinary asexual reproduction, the process can lead to death for honeybees, since roughly one-third of their genes end up inbred, causing the larvae to die before maturing, explained Oldroyd in the report. But the Cape area's honeybee workers have found a way to procreate without sacrificing their genetic health. In fact, one of them has re-cloned itself hundreds of millions of times since 1990.

However, this doesn't bode well for the well-being of the larger bee colony, warned Oldroyd. The queen bee is usually the only one that reproduces, commanding other bees to do the work of constantly building on and restoring the health of the colony. In this scenario, once worker bees start cloning themselves, which typically goes down after a significant disruption or disturbance of the hive, the rigidity of the bee hierarchy is put into question. At times, clones have developed into a queen of their own, leading to increased levels of dysfunction. "Eventually the workers just sort of hang around laying eggs not doing any work," explained Oldroyd. "The colony dies, and [the cloning workers] spread to the next colony."

However, once these workers have slid their way into the next colony, they go on laying eggs! And this not only disrupts the new colony. It can also seize control, laying waste to the pristine order one expects from a clockwork beehive. Chaos truly reigns. "They kill about 10 percent of South African colonies every year," lamented Oldroyd in theNew Scientist report. "It's like a transmissible social cancer." Intrigued by the strong genetic integrity of worker clones who avoid the pitfalls of inbreeding, Oldroyd and his team did a compare and contrast analysis of Cape worker bees between virgin queens and their offspring.

The team found that Cape queens typically reproduce sexually (with a partner), which means forcing them to make the magic happen asexually required fitting the insects with a strip of surgical tape glued via nail varnish, to enact a kind of insect contraception. The female worker bees still met up with male ones amid mating flights, so they laid their eggs anyway. The research team then genotyped one queen and 25 of her larvae, in addition to four worker bees and 63 of their asexually produced larvae. The results showed that queen offspring produced asexually exhibited levels of genetic recombination 100 times greater than levels seen in cloned worker-bee offspring. The latter's offspring were basically perfect reproductions of their mothers, said Oldroyd.

A lot of people want to live forever, and many of those who don't would prefer not to give up their life until they've had their fill of it. Sadly, there's no clear way to adapt these worker bee skills for human purposes, but it still shows the incredible ingenuity of evolution, and how, even when its own mechanism of continuing a species through time is threatened by inbred genetics, life finds a way. Even if it's the same way. Hundreds of millions of times. And it endangers all of your friends.

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A Bee Cloned Itself Millions of Times Over the Last 30 Years - Interesting Engineering