Tag: extinction
Extinction Rebellion: Climate activists stage Earth Day demonstration
Scientists plan to bring dodo back to life 400 years after its extinction
SCIENTISTS are bringing the dodo back to life 400 years after its extinction.
They will use gene-editing techniques to mine the dodo genome for traits they can put in a pigeon – its closest relative.
Gene editing company Colossal Biosciences is planning to bring back the dodo[/caption]
The flightless dodo, native to Mauritius, was wiped off the face of the Earth in the 17th century.
The gene editing company involved, Colossal Biosciences, is already undertaking plans to bring back the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, a wolf-like predator last seen in Tasmania in 1930.
But reviving a bird will be the first to use an external egg — meaning scientists can modify pigeon eggs without having to meddle with a living animal’s reproductive system.
US entrepreneur Ben Lamm, the co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said they could even rehome the bird in its former country.
He said: “We are very transparent that [the place] to reintroduce the dodo into the wild would be Mauritius.”
But bringing the bird back has ruffled feathers within the science community – with some saying the money would best be spent saving living creatures.
Extinction Rebellion co-founder fined for smashing Barclays window
Earth’s sixth mass extinction event has begun, study warns
New research predicts that more than a quarter of the world’s animals and plants could go extinct by the end of the century.
Read more: Earth’s sixth mass extinction event has begun, study warns
OSnews Decries ‘The Mass Extinction of Unix Workstations’
Today OSnews looked back — but also explored what happens when you try to buy one today> :
As x86 became ever more powerful and versatile, and with the rise of Linux as a capable UNIX replacement and the adoption of the NT-based versions of Windows, the days of the UNIX workstations were numbered. A few years into the new millennium, virtually all traditional UNIX vendors had ended production of their workstations and in some cases even their associated architectures, with a lacklustre collective effort to move over to Intel’s Itanium — which didn’t exactly go anywhere and is now nothing more than a sour footnote in computing history.
Approaching roughly 2010, all the UNIX workstations had disappeared…. and by now, they’re all pretty much dead (save for Solaris). Users and industries moved on to x86 on the hardware side, and Linux, Windows, and in some cases, Mac OS X on the software side…. Over the past few years, I have come to learn that If you want to get into buying, using, and learning from UNIX workstations today, you’ll run into various problems which can roughly be filed into three main categories: hardware availability, operating system availability, and third party software availability.
Their article details their own attempts to buy one over the years, ultimately concluding the experience “left me bitter and frustrated that so much knowledge — in the form of documentation, software, tutorials, drivers, and so on — is disappearing before our very eyes.”
Shortsightedness and disinterest in their own heritage by corporations, big and small, is destroying entire swaths of software, and as more years pass by, it will get ever harder to get any of these things back up and running…. As for all the third-party software — well, I’m afraid it’s too late for that already. Chasing down the rightsholders is already an incredibly difficult task, and even if you do find them, they are probably not interested in helping you, and even if by some miracle they are, they most likely no longer even have the ability to generate the required licenses or release versions with the licensing ripped out. Stuff like Pro/ENGINEER and SoftWindows for UNIX are most likely gone forever….
Software is dying off at an alarming rate, and I fear there’s no turning the tide of this mass extinction.
The article also wonders why companies like HPE don’t just “dump some ISO files” onto an FTP server, along with patch depots and documentation. “This stuff has no commercial value, they’re not losing any sales, and it will barely affect their bottom line.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
What YOU can do to save your local pharmacy from extinction
Eight arrests after Extinction Rebellion protesters superglue themselves around Speaker’s chair in Commons
Endling – Extinction is Forever is not afraid to hurt you
In a video game climate that bends over backwards to assure you the cute little creatures you play as or with cannot be harmed, it was shocking to hear the mother fox’s neck snap in Endling – Extinction is Forever. I was running with my trio of kits, trying to escape the murderous clutches of a furrier when he caught me. I struggled as he held me down before I heard the crack of the bones as the screen went dark, informing me I had failed as a mother and that my cubs were going to die. And while I thought that was a little too much, that kind of unflinching look at the reality of survival in a world ruined by climate change is exactly what the developers were going for.
“We wanted to put everything there,” Javier Romello, CEO of Endling’…