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A cloning scientist created “human/cow” embryos, containing DNA from both humans and cattle, which lived for several weeks and could have been implanted into a woman’s womb.

Jonathan Leake of The (U.K.) Sunday Times writes that Panayiotis Zavos made the hybrid embryos by inserting human DNA into the eggs of a cow. He did it in order to refine his cloning techniques and says, “We are not trying to create monsters.”

The embryos grew to several hundred cells, which is beyond the stage, known as differentiation, in which cells begin to develop into tissues and organs.
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Lucy Pringle’s 2004 crop circle calendar is now in stock. If you receive our free newsletter, you got a special $2.00 off coupon. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll find a $3.00 off coupon in the subscriber section. These make great Christmas gifts, but be aware that we only have 300 in stock?and they’ll go fast!

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Hunters in many states have been warned not to eat deer or elk meat, since it can be contaminated with chronic wasting disease (CWD), a version of Mad Cow Disease, which can be transferred to humans who eat the meat. Mad Cow was spread by farmers grinding up cow bones and feeding them to cattle, but how does CWD spread in wild animals? The answer may be that prions stay alive in the dirt.

Prions are the infectious proteins that spread the disease and researchers have found that they’re more likely to live some types of soil than in others, which may be why some areas of the country are affected, while others aren’t. CWD was first detected in deer and elk in Colorado and Wyoming in the 1980s, and in Wisconsin in 2002.
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It’s not just the big asteroids we have to watch out for?the little rocks can be dangerous too. They’re hundreds of them out there and they’re hard to spot, but NASA has decided it had better start searching for them.

Robert Roy Britt writes in Space.com that it will cost at least $236 million to add a search for small asteroids to their ongoing Near Earth Object (NEO) detection program. An asteroid twice the size of a football field or bigger hits the Earth about every 15,000 to 20,000 years, according to NASA’s Donald Yeomans. Impacts from smaller space rocks cause only regional problems, but these could be severe, and there are so many more of them that this kind of impact is much more likely to occur.
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