By now you've probably heard of cloned sheep, cows, chickens, dogs and cats.  But cloned mammoths? That's science fiction, right?  Well, not quite.  Apparently, scientists from Russia and South Korea have signed on to a joint project to clone a wooly mammoth using ancient DNA and elephant cells.  The project is headed by Korean cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-Suk. 
    Suk has already generated controversy by some of his claims in human cloning that were later proven to be untrue.  In this instance, however, he insists his methods are on the up and up. 
    Basically, the team intends remove the nuclei from the ova of an Indian elephant and inject cells retrieved from the remains of a mammoth embryo.  Will it work?  The last mammoths roamed the earth 4,500 years ago.  Theories vary as to the cause of their extinction.  Some scientists attribute their demise to warmer temperatures and retreating glaciers.  Others claim human hunters drove the beasts out of business.  Now, it seems, that humans may be on the verge of bringing them back.  Stay tuned (but don't hold your breath.)

Links
If you want to learn more, you can read articles in the Vancouver Sun or UK Daily Telegraph.  More about the sequencing of mammoth DNA, here and if you want to read up on mammoths in general, the Illinois State Museum has an excellent mammoth page.

Picture Credit:
Florida Educational Technology Clearinghouse
 

New York has a lot of things--museums, parks, restaurants, world famous sky-scrapers, world-series winning baseball teams. Now its got its own frog.  According to today's New York Times, a new species of leopard frog has been discovered on Staten Island.  Of course, the frog doesn't just live there.  New York shares "its" frog with Connecticut, New Jersey, and other states in the region.  Nevertheless, I predict the New York Leopard Frogs will certainly emerge as one of the top names for the city's Little League teams this spring.

So far the frog does not have a special name, but the Time's is sponsoring a contest to remedy that.  What will it be?  Amphibious Bull (Frog) Markatus? Amphibious Big Appleus? What's your best idea?

Photo Credit: New York Times

_"I picked up on the grass a palmer-worm, which is a caterpillar, so named because it travels about like a palmer or pilgrim. It has long, thick tufts of black and red hair, and a very minute gold spot to each ring ; it crawls very quickly. It seems to eat chiefly the leaves of the dock, the vine, and the lilac."  Emily Shore, age 13, June 21, 1832.

I was doing some research on the history of science and nature writing when I came across the above quote attributed a 13-year old English girl named Emily Shore.  I had never heard of her before.  A little further research took me to her journal, which was published by her family in 1891, over fifty years after her death at the age of 19 in 1839. 
    Emily, it seems, was quite a prolific writer.  The journal starts around her 11th birthday and follows her through her teens.  During that time she also authored works she refers to as histories, novels, stories, poetry, and plays.  Unfortunately, only the journal survived, but that is enough to give us a taste of her lively mind.  
    On her first trip to London eleven-year-old Emily describes her impressions of the new London Bridge--"very beautiful, but not yet competed,"--the monument to Lord Nelson--"I find the urn at the top very ugly,"--and St. Paul's Cathedral, where she stood in the Whispering Gallery and noted that from that height, "the people in the church look like dolls or monkeys." 
    She was thrilled to receive a copy of Charles Babbage's Economy of Manufactures for her 13th birthday.  Babbage, you may recall,  is regarded as the father of the modern computer for his  invention of  the "difference engine" in the 1820s.  At first glance, Economy does not seem to be the kind of book a 13-year old would enjoy.  Emily, however, called it "beautiful and interesting." It made her realize how little she knew about how things were made: "It is astonishing how ignorant people are about the method of making the commonest things, and it quite vexes and mortifies me to look round the room and see scarce an article in it of the construction of which I have the least idea. I wish some one would write a book giving a minute account of all the English manufactures."
    Her real love, though, was the natural world.  During the summer, she rose early and spent nearly all her time outdoors.  She wrote detailed descriptions of plants, insects, birds, reptiles, and animals of all kinds.  She collected caterpillars, but when they started to die, she decided she would let the survivors go, declaring,  "Poor little creatures. I shall never keep caterpillars alive again. While they were in the full enjoyment of health and liberty, I took them prisoners, confined them in a box, and shut them up in a house, far from their homes; by which means almost all have been destroyed. It makes me quite unhappy to think of it. I shall certainly set them all at liberty to-morrow, and put them on one of the plants to which they belong."
    In her observations of nature, she noted behavior and speculated on why the world took the form it did.  When watching a moth she concluded," It is not perhaps generally known that all kinds of plants have their particular moth or butterfly, and that which feeds on one could not feed on another." And when she went to the shore, she wrote that, "A large space of ground, at some distance from the sea (as much as two miles, indeed), is entirely composed of a bed of round pebbles, whose depth is said to be interminable. It is not that the ground is stony, but there is nothing to be seen except these pebbles. Query:  Is it possible that the sea has in ancient times retired and left these stones behind it?"
      These were exactly the kinds of observations and questions the greatest scientific minds of her age were engaged in. It is moving and delightful to hear them voiced by youngster, and a girl, no less!
    When not busy with writing, Emily tutored local children, attended to her own lessons, made models of ships, bridges, and buildings, and filled sketchbooks with portraits and nature studies.  In her late teens she contracted tuberculosis, the scourge of the nineteenth century. Though her family moved to Portugal in hopes that the climate would heal her, she died shorty before her twentieth birthday. 
    Reading the journal of this gifted young woman, I was reminded a bit by her tone of another girl who made her literary appearance a generation later.  This other child, by contrast, was completely imaginary.  Lewis Carroll's Alice is also fascinated by plants and animals and filled with wonder for the world.  Emily, in her own way, turned her world into a wonderland.  Her journal is a wonderful document, and I hope, like Alice, she will someday receive her literary due.

If you want to read Emily's journal yourself, you can find on online copy at the Internet Archive or buy a copy from Amazon.  The library at the University of Delaware included Emily's journal in a fascinating exhibit SELF WORKS:
DIARIES, SCRAPBOOKS, AND OTHER AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL EFFORTS.  Well worth a visit.

Photo Credit:
Portrait of Emily Shore by herself from The Journal of Emily Shore, 1898 Edition.

 Inca Khipu:  Anthropologists Take a Crack at an Ancient Code

I just finished putting the final touches on book about PreColumbian cultures of South America for Buoy Point Media. What was one of the most interesting things I learned while writing? 
    The Inca used knotted strings as a record keeping system.  Called khipu, strings of different lengths and colors  could be combined together to create a complex, multilevel record system. Each knot might have a different meaning depending on where it lay on the string, it's relationship to other knots, and even the direction in which it was tied.
    What kinds of information did these knots record? Most likely they were used as a numerical system to keep track of goods and services--a sort of cloth spreadsheet.  They may have also represented the calendar dates of important events--the birth or death of an emperor, for instance.  Beyond that, however, the khipu many have had even more detailed and complicated meanings.
    Unlike the Aztec and Maya, the Inca never developed hieroglyphics or any other formal system of writing. The Spanish, who conquered the Inca in 1533, preserved a few khipu but seemed to have little interest in their use. After all, what were a bunch of knotted strings compared to the beautiful textiles, pottery, and gold ornaments for which the Inca were famous? Only about 600 original Inca khipu are known to exist today. For hundreds of years those  khipu were confined to remote display cases or left boxed on shelves in museums. 
      Enter Gary Urton, a Harvard based anthropologist and expert on Inca civilization. After studying many khipu, he began to believe that the knots were more than just a numerical system. They represented a unique and highly developed code.  They were, in essence, a form of writing.  In 2002, Urton published Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in Andean Knotted String Records, a book elaborating on his theories.  He also established the Harvard Khipu Database Project.  Bringing together anthropologists, archaeologists, computer programers, mathematicians, textile conservators, and historians, the Project is an ongoing effort crack the code of the Inca.  By entering information on all known khipu, the researchers hope to not only prove the knots were a genuine written language, but also to reveal what that writing tells us about the people who tied those knots so long ago.

Photo Credit:
Peabody Museum, Harvard University