181–190 of 208 posts
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/science/colossal-dire-wol... This however disagreed with Wikipedia, and said there was some inbreeding. That helps make this less fake.
Do you mean "interbreeding?" If so, I'd like to see the actual source for that claim.
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14 isn't enough for you, though it is enough to influence looks to the point that it does look different enough, but how many genes need to be changed for it to count, for you? There's some 40 million differences between humans and chimpanzees, but only about 700 that are unique to humans.
Source for those numbers? Your last sentence doesn't seem to make sense.
gives the 40 million (35+5). It gives by name a bunch of genes unique to humans, though doesn't count them. 300 is just an estimate, I couldn't find a specific reference to that number, thought it's widely to believed to be in the hundreds (and not, say, the millions).
Also https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/comparison-human-and-chi...
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Source for those numbers? Your last sentence doesn't seem to make sense.
https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/comparison-human-and-chi... gives the 40 million (35+5). It gives by name a bunch of genes unique to humans, though doesn't count them. 300 is just an estimate, I couldn't find a specific reference to that number, thought it's widely to believed to be in the hundreds (and not, say, the millions). Also https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/comparison-human-and-chi...
> At the protein level, 29 percent of genes code for the same amino sequences in chimpanzees and humans.
There are about 20,000 known protein-coding genes in the human genome [1], so that alone refutes the notion that there are only about 700 differences unique to humans. Besides novel unique and changes in the protein sequences themselves, changes in gene regulation is another obvious source of differences.
See this for a more thorough, and up to date, review
https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1286...
We're overdue for a horse archer empire as well
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Do you mean "interbreeding?" If so, I'd like to see the actual source for that claim.
Yes I do mean interbreeding. The rest of the NYT article ought to cite the source. I can no longer read it so you better check yourself.
I wish people would focus more on increasing dog lifespans instead of stuff like this. How about a Bernese Mountain Dog that lives 15+ years instead of 7 years.
I never realised the Dire Wolf was a real historical animal, not just a fantasy one like the Owlbear.
And therein lies the problem, they went extinct because their prey went extinct - unless you bring back the mammoths for them to hunt, they're never going to survive in the wild; and are essentially "a wolf with a bigger appetite" to keep captive.
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I got really excited that it's about Minecraft's once popular modpack
Dire is still at it. New pack for Minecraft 1.21 updated as recently as a few weeks ago! https://feed-the-beast.com/modpacks/126-ftb-presents-direwol... You can even see some history/stats for all the Direwolf packs: https://feed-the-beast.com/modpacks?search=direwolf&sort=fea...
Here's[0] a recent editorial about Colossal, the company behind this. Basically, they make some flimsy claims about conservation and combating climate change to justify creating a poor imitation of Jurassic Park. Naturally, there's some real moral dilemmas that they gloss over in pursuit of the money a few wealthy people will pay to be able to say "I saw a Mammoth!" [0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/editor…
Every project I've seen of theirs has been like this one: take an existing animal and tweak its genome very slightly to make it look kinda like the extinct one, then declare that they've brought back the extinct species. Never mind that it's still just a wolf with 14 very specific genes tweaked. That could be just a limitation of the current technology and one that they're working on fixing—maybe some day they plan t…
What they've created here are not actually dire wolves but a couple of timber wolves with about a dozen edits to 12 million gene pairs and the result is creatures that have phenotypic similarities to dire wolves but not their complete genetic signature.
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Don't farmers get reimbursed for livestock lost to natural predators?
Not in the USA. There a variety of random government programs that give money in ways that do not make sense. It would be better to have zero government support and have the market naturally raise prices up a bit to cover things directly. Right now, government programs are set up to take care of a variety of special interests, most of which are silly and don't really help farmers and are very wasteful. I had four gov…