The Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, was officially declared extinct in 2000 when the last-known animal of its kind was found dead in northern Spain. Shortly before its death, scientists preserved skin samples of the goat, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen. Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned. Sadly, the newborn ibex kid died shortly after birth due to physical defects in its lungs. Other cloned animals, including sheep, have been born with similar lung defects. But the breakthrough has raised hopes that it will be possible to save endangered and newly extinct species by resurrecting them from frozen tissue
How far would you go to help save an endangered animal? How about allowing someone to jab ink into your skin with tiny needles, 150 times a second? That’s exactly what hundreds of volunteers signed up for last weekend at ExtInked, where people came from far and wide to have one of Britain’s most endangered species permanently tattooed on their body, making them a life long ambassador for that species
The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries. Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 BC
An Iron Age treasure hoard unearthed by a metal-detecting amateur has been unveiled. The four gold Iron Age neck ornaments, or torcs, date from between the 1st and 3rd Century BC and are said to be worth an estimated £1m. They were discovered in September by first-time
metal-detector enthusiast David Booth in a field in Stirlingshire. The find is the most important hoard of Iron Age gold in Scotland to date
The US House of Representatives has taken its last mainframe offline, signaling the end of a computing era in Washington, DC. The last mainframe supposedly enjoyed quasi-celebrity status
within the House data center, having spent 12 years keeping the House’s inventory control records and financial management data, among other tasks. But it was time for a change, with the House spending $30,000 a year to power the mainframe and another $700,000 each year for maintenance and support
Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the group responsible for the launching the Ministry of Silly Walks and the Parrot Sketch on an unsuspecting world, was on Monday celebrating 40 years since the comedy sketch show was first broadcast. The show, which was written and acted by John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman, first aired on October 5, 1969 and ran for a total of 45 episodes. It was the Pythons’ surreal and satirical humour which shot them to global fame in the 1970s, as they broke new ground in what was acceptable in terms of both style and content
Archaeologists have discovered Stonehenge’s little sister — just a mile from the famous monument. The prehistoric circle, unearthed in secret over the summer, is one of the most important prehistoric finds in decades. Researchers have called it Bluehenge
after the colour of the 27 giant Welsh stones it once incorporated — but are now missing
Bletchley Park, the wartime intelligence centre, has achieved a breakthrough which could mean that its historic wooden huts are saved from going to rot. There is now a high chance that the Enigma machines, which cracked the codes used by the Nazi high command, will be able to go back into the hut where they were first housed. The trust that runs the site has been awarded a grant by the National Lottery which is the first step towards a much larger award, totalling more than £4m
Porcupine quills and cactus spines are among the tools used to prepare a £1m hoard of Viking treasure to go on public show in York on 17 September
A Maori legend about a giant, man-eating bird has been confirmed by scientists. Te Hokioi was a huge black-and-white predator with a red crest and yellow-green tinged wingtips, in an account given to Sir George Gray, an early governor of New Zealand. It was said to be named after its cry and to have raced the hawk to the heavens
. Scientists now think the stories handed down by word of mouth and depicted in rock drawings refer to Haast’s eagle, a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago
The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the appalling
way he was treated for being gay. Alan Turing, a mathematician most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes, was convicted of gross indecency
in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration. Gordon Brown’s statement came in response to a petition posted on the Number 10 web site which has received thousands of signatures in recent months
Much of the world knows Petra, the ancient ruin in modern-day Jordan that is celebrated in poetry as the rose-red city, ‘half as old as time’
, and which provided the climactic backdrop for
Britain’s oldest original computer, the Harwell, is being sent to the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley where it is to be restored to working order. The computer, which was designed in 1949, first ran in 1951 and was designed to perform mathematical calculations; it lasted until 1973. When first built the 2.4m x 5m computer was state-of-the-art, although it was superseded by transistor-based systems. The restoration project is expected to take a year
A campaign has been launched to win a posthumous apology for computer pioneer Alan Turing over his conviction for homosexuality. The brilliant mathematician, who spent his key years at Manchester University, is hailed as one of the founders of modern computing. But a conviction for homosexuality effectively ended his career. Troubled Turing went on to commit suicide in 1954, aged just 41. Now a group of admirers of the scientist — named as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century by Time Magazine — are lobbying the government to make a posthumous apology
Spanish researchers claim to have discovered evidence of a type of giant worm that lived 475 million years ago and was up to one metre in length. The fossilised tracks of the marine worms were found in the Cabaneros National Park in central Spain in an area that was a seabed during the Lower Ordovician period, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) said. It said the creatures lived in horizontal galleries of five metres in length and 15-20 centimetres in diameter under the seabed
The detailed service records of 250,000 medieval soldiers — including archers who served with Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt — have gone online. The database of those who fought in the Hundred Years War reveals salaries, sickness records and who was knighted. The full profiles of soldiers from 1369 to 1453 will allow researchers to piece together details of their lives
The surviving workers from the Bletchley Park cryptography unit are to be honoured, nearly 70 years after the unit was formed. The Bletchley Park code breakers, known as Station X during the Second World War, were never officially recognised for their invaluable work in deciphering German, Italian and Japanese military codes — work this is thought to have shortened the war by more than two years and saved millions of lives
About 800 pages of the earliest surviving Christian Bible have been recovered and put on the internet. Visitors to the website www.codexsinaiticus.org can now see images of more than half the 1,600-year-old Codex Sinaiticus manuscript. Fragments of the 4th Century document — written in Greek on parchment leaves — have been worked on by institutions in the UK, Germany, Egypt and Russia. Experts say it is a window into the development of early Christianity
The original CompuServe service, first offered in 1979, was shut down this past week by its current owner, AOL. The service, which provided its users with addresses such as 7,3402,3633 and was the first major online service, had seen the number of users dwindle in recent years. At its height, the service boasted about having over half a million users simultaneously on line. Many innovations we now take for granted, from online travel (Eaasy Sabre), online shopping, online stock quotations, and global weather forecasts, just to name a few, were standard fare on CompuServe in the 1980s
id software’s John Carmack has begun delivering on his love of the iPhone with a brand new game made just for the platform called Doom Resurrection, available right now on the App Store. There’s nothing small about this game at all — it offers up 76 mb of original id shooter, including eight levels total
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