Hey kids, you don't need a dog because everyone has one of those. And cats are more clever than you and don't care if you live or die. What you need — what the world is asking for — is a woolly mammoth. Wouldn't that be as cool as any ice age? For more than a decade, researchers have wondered about bringing a new woolly mammoth into the world. This possibility gained some flesh when a 39,000-year-old female mammoth named Yuka was unveiled in Yokohama, Japan, earlier this month. Inside the deflated but remarkably intact remains — thick fur surviving millennia in the Siberian permafrost — may be a viable blood sample. Preserved enough, researchers hope, to be cloned. It would be an astounding feat — in this case, likely mixing it with the DNA of an elephant. But why stop there? Last year, the journal Nature announced scientists successfully revived a plant lost about 30,000 years ago, during a period when Earth's northern expanses were home to mammoths. The flowering plant came from seeds buried by squirrels. And if a plant or a woolly mammoth, then why not clone a Neanderthal? Harvard researcher George Church, dubbed the 'Picasso of DNA', has raised that in his new book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. Neanderthals died off around 30,000 years ago. Read more http://www.torontosun.com/2013/07/25/cloning-a-mammoth-weve-never-been-closer
