Can somebody who understands how cloning actually works tell me what kind of relation Webby has with Scrooge?
Wouldn’t that make Webby Scrooge’s identical twin or something?
I need someone to lay down the facts to me.
Because we know Webby and Scrooge share genetic similarities and she was a by product of a cloning this actually means…
blankity blankity blank
Okay so theoretically speaking, by cloning you get two exact copies of dna, so yeah technically genetic twins.
(However you start with an embryo, since as far as I know, you can’t create a whole adult being out of nowhere. Of course, when it comes to any creature, there’s more factors apart from dna that determines the character or the features of an individual, so it’s not unusual for clones to look or behave different.)
What I don’t understand is that we’ve had several cases of cloning in the series before but none of them followed this, so by in-world logic, Webby and Scrooge should be identical twins just like all the other ones.
My pet theory of the moment is that Black Heron hadn’t perfected cloning juuuust yet, so rather than making a full clone, she literally created the heir with perhaps a cloned (blank) egg and Scrooge as the paternal DNA. Which means Webby would have a biological mother…leaving a lot of fun possibilities open for who that donor might be, anyone from a completely random anonymous duck to someone significant.
I had to censor a bit of this photo to make it suitable to post here. When I used the Lightroom cloning tool, it tried to clone out my labia with a literal bush! You win this round Lightroom!
Shogo Chikaishi is an unhappy young man. He has no idea who his birth father was, and his mother supported them by inviting a string of horny men to her bed. She had little love to spare for her child, who often got in the way of getting her customers to part with their cash. Sometimes he even glimpsed moments of his mother and her clients making the…
So, you know those spindly basil plants you can get in the supermarket that are all leggy and pale, and you put them on the window-ledge and pick a few leaves from them and then they die?
Here is the hack for
turning it into a healthy plant and
making an army of clones from it so that all your friends can have one too
You will need
one parent plant
scissors for cutting the stalks
enough pots for however many seedlings you want to make
compost
one or two empty bottles
Method
Have a look at your parent plant. You’ll see that each bundle of leaves comes out from a knobbly bit in the stem. That knobbly bit is called a leaf node.
Gently take hold of the very top set of leaves and count the leaf nodes on that particular stalk, counting down from the top.
If there are more than three nodes, cut the stalk just below the second leaf node.
The bit that you have just cut off is called a cutting, and it will become a new plant. To do this, we have to get it to grow roots.
Take your cutting and remove all the leaves except the four at the very top.
Fill your bottle with water and insert the cutting into the top of the bottle, with the stem completely submerged in water, and the leaves outside in the air.
Now repeat until you’ve taken about six cuttings, or you’ve taken all the cuttings available. Put them all in water-filled bottles. (I use milk bottles which hold about four stems at once with enough space for their leaves to get the sunlight, but if you’re using wine bottles it might be fewer.)
Put the cuttings/bottles onto a sunny window-ledge and wait. Within about a week you should see roots beginning to grow. Keep the water topped up to the top, and let the roots grow until they are two or three inches long.
When the roots are 2-3 inches long, fill your pots with compost and water them well. Shove your fingers in the wet compost to make a space for the cutting’s new roots and gently insert the cutting into the hole. Put a little bit more compost on top and firm it down, move on to plant the next one.
Providing all your cuttings get over the shock of transfer (and they probably will) you will then have 8 little basil plants like the smallest ones in my picture.
Put them back on the sunny window-ledge to let them get established and begin to grow. Congrats, you now have 8 basil plants plus the parent plant.
The parent plant
When you’re taking the cuttings, you must leave at least one leaf node on every stalk. The plant can’t create leaves without the nodes, and if it has no leaves it’s basically going to die.
You want the plant to create new leaves and thicken up. If a stalk doesn’t have more than two nodes, don’t make cuttings from that stalk at all. Leave that stalk to grow.
Taking your cuttings will stimulate the plant to grow, and lower nodes which may not have had leaves on them when you got the plant, will now begin to produce them. This will make the plant bushier and stronger, but it will need a bit of extra food to help it put the extra effort in. So give it a new layer of compost on the top, water it, and put it back on the sunny window-ledge as well.
First batch cuttings
Let your first generation of cuttings grow undisturbed for a few weeks. (Water only when the soil feels dry.)
When they start looking long and thin, you want to encourage them to create side-shoots and begin bushing out. You don’t want a long thin plant. It will fall over in the wind.
Look at the very top of the plant where you will see two tiny baby leaves developing. If you let them develop, the plant will continue to grow long and thin, but if you take them out it will encourage the side shoots to grow. Pinch out the tiny baby leaves right at the top of the cuttings, and very soon you’ll see they start to grow outwards instead of upwards.
Second batch cuttings
After a few weeks your cuttings will look like the larger plants in my picture, and your parent plant will have grown enough to have added extra nodes. Which means that you can now take another batch of cuttings and start the process all over again.
You can pretty much keep this going all summer if you want.
Give plants away, eat fresh basil all summer and fill your freezer with bags of basil leaves for the winter :) Happy cloning!
In case you haven’t heard, a 10,000 year old mammoth carcass found in Russia reportedly contains mammoth blood. After this discovery was made, the internet was rampant with declarations that now we would be able to “clone” a mammoth and bring this long extinct species back to life. How far-fetched is this? Well, that statement may as well be out in space. DNA begins to break down at death, so paleogeneticists would likely draw only scraps of genetic material from the mammoth. Then they would try to place those scraps into a DNA patchwork of the best approximation of what we think a mammoth’s genome would be like.
The result would not be a resurrected woolly mammoth genome; it would be modern science’s best approximation of mammothness.
That’s to say nothing of actually creating a baby mammoth. Researchers could try to manipulate the sex cells of modern Asian elephants—the closest living relatives to mammoths—to get a mother Asian elephant to carry a mammoth baby, or genetic engineers could alter the genome of elephants bit by bit until they reverse-engineered a living hypothesis of a woolly mammoth.
But researchers are not even close to those experimental steps.
Photograph courtesy of Semyon Grigoryev, Northeastern Federal University/AFP/Getty Images, and National Geographic.
Firstly, thank you so much for your tags! I really appreciate them, and I was most concerned about how I did the hairline so I’m glad you liked it!
Secondly, a word of advice. Do not ever, ever, ever write an essay on here. Do it on Wordpad, or Word, or Google Drive, or literally anything else I swear to fuck. Copy it to your clipboard every once and awhile? Not enough. You will forget, and copy something else, and before you can copy your thirteen-paragraph-and-growing monster of an opinion on belly buttons and cloning, your computer is going to crash.
Alright, that said, in the original essay I started with a paragraph of I don’t know’s. I think, at this given point, with how many Wikipedia pages I have researched and scoured and ripped my hair out over within the last three hours, and how many literal theses I went through, I maybe know a little. Enough to formulate a solid opinion? No, because I am indecisive, but certainly enough to inform (most importantly, to inflict).
Placental mammals (Placentalia) are the only animals to ever be born with belly buttons, because the umbilical cord is what feeds the fetus. They are us: we are them. They give birth to relatively large babies and have no epipubic bones (bones extending forward from the pelvis).
We also know that Jango Fett is human, or at least mostly human enough that it’s never brought up. Adittionally, looking at Attack of the Clones, I am almost positive you can see umbilical cord looking things.
While the star wars wiki says the clones recieved nutrients through a “nutrient bath,” but unless the nutrients are fat-soluble they’d never make it past the first layer of skin. You know, unless there was a tube that brought the nutrients to the body. While babies in the womb do swallow some amniotic fluid, this can’t supplement the nutrients required to thrive.
While there are some fat-soluble nutrients, most of the ones necessary for a baby to thrive aren’t. So, the clones would need a sort of umbilical cord, and some kind of placenta.
Whether the pseudo-placentas are indivual or shared would dictate how the clones grow. If all clones have individual placentas, they each have equal oppurtunity to grow to the same capacity. However, the placentas are shared, there is high chance that some clones would get more nutrients and others would get less.
This raises questions about variations in clone height, weight, and development, but the short answer is yes, they probably have some kind of bellybutton, even if it’s just surgical scarring from the removal of the pseudo-umbilical cord.
Alright y’all It’s time to settle this debate; is captain Rex a natural blonde or not?
Please reblog with your reasons for why or why not, I really wanna get everyone’s thoughts on this!
Rex is a natural blond in canon, but not in legends.
reasoning:
-there’s that one cadet with blond hair and do we really think the kaminoans are letting 6 year old cadets dye their hair?
-Rex’s hair is buzzed super short so unless he dyes his hair like once a week he’d have roots showing all the time
-his hair is still blond even at the end of the kadavo arc and the umbara arc, both of which took place over enough time for his hair to have grown out at least a bit and I seriously doubt he had access to hair dye during those arcs
-wasn’t he still blond when he showed up in Bad Batch?? Do we seriously believe that Rex was THAT dedicated to his look?
Why he’s not a natural blond in legends:
-that one clone wars novel where Rex dyed his hair blue to support some space sportsball team and then felt self-conscious and dyed it blond again.
-though it’s been a while since I’ve read it so I forget if it’s explicit that the blond was a result of dying initially
Karen Traviss said he bleaches his hair so he Absolutely Does Not
thank you anon ^^ and here you go. i tried to make it fairly accurate, but i stopped watching the clone wars show a long long time ago (not my favourite by any means) so i apologise if anything is wrong.
okay so why does rex have blonde hair? jango has black/dark brown hair, so is there a legit explanation? does he bleach it?
I was going to just leave a comment and reblog separately, but it got too long so here it is as a reblog:
Dude I love the art style! It’s really cool and I love the shading/lighting for everything. I really, really like the armor. Like, cannot get over it. The scratches? Very sexy. I think my favorite part is the … shoulder thing. Also my boy has forearms oh my God.
So, there are couple theories for the hair thing, though there isn’t a canon explanation:
1. He dyed/bleached it. Easy enough, we see several clones with clearly dyed hair in TCW (google “Crys” for reference, and possibly Gree, though he doesn’t work if we also think about the second theory). Although you would think that Rex’s hair, if dyed/bleached, would grow out and start showing roots during times where he’s captured, on the front lines, etc. But it never does, so idk.
2. It’s a genetic mutation. Also pretty easy to consider seeing as we know there are other genetic mutations in the cloning process that can happen (see, the Bad Batch and clone 99), this can also happen in real life (minus the cloning), and we also see very young clones with blonde hair as well (Omega and that one other kid we see in one of Boba’s episodes). Considering the Kaminoans’ take with clones and their individuality (which seems to be rather strongly against it), it’s unlikely these two children were able to access the same hair dye that clones on the front lines can.
We also know it’s in Jango’s genetic material according to Legends (though I think the comic’s been semi re-canonized due to the Mandalorian season 2), because his sister and mother were blonde. His mother’s hair in particular seems to have similar texture and style to the blonde clones’.
We can’t use a punnett square or anything for hair, because it’s determined by multiple alleles and thus, could happen regardless, but with the mother’s hair, and considering it can’t be totally recessive if the sister was also blonde, it’s possible that a mutation occured in the cloning process and, if Jango was likely to be blonde himself anyway, this is reasonably an occurance that could happen more than once (thus explaining how there’s multiple clones with this mutation).
An additional point of notice is that if his (Rex’s) hair is naturally blonde, it’s possible that there are clones with mixed hair types, or hair with other colors from Jango’s DNA. Now, according to this one article I read xD, black hair is made from a subtype of the same pigment that makes brown and blonde, but is dominant and less likely to blend with other colors. And Jango definately has black hair (look at the movies or the Wiki, comics is iffy) like his father.
But Boba doesn’t (even if it says so on the Wiki, look at movie Boba’s actual hair), so what I’m saying is, it’s already pretty likely that hair mutations are happening, even if you don’t personally think it’s happening here with Rex. There is … at least a decently good change this is what’s happening with Rex.
Also possibly Commander Gree, who might just have naturally red-brown hair and eyebrows along with his monstrosity of a haircut (god, it is sobad).
3. He’s naturally blonde and dyes his eyebrows. Lmao, could be? I mean, not all naturally blonde people have blonde eyebrows. You can’t really tell by the mother in Open Seasons (the comic), but the mom might have acutal eyebrows and the sister definately has blonde eyebrows, so 50/50 I guess. That said, if this were the case, dark-haired people can also have blonde eyebrows so if this mutation occured it’s also possible that we’d get dark haired clones with blonde eyebrows. Soooooo, food for thought.
Anyways, all this to say, nobody knows, and this got way longer than I meant it to be. Sorry my guy. Hope you like the answer because it takes up most of the page. (×̯×)
Twenty years ago today on February 22, 1997, Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and colleagues at the Roslin Institute, announced the existence of a 7 month old sheep named Dolly, the product of cloning. She was clonedusing and adult cell and born on July, 5, 1996 and raised under the auspices of the UK Ministry of Agriculture and Scottish company PPL Therapeutics. A Dorset Finn sheep, Dolly lived for six and half years before she was euthanized due to illness. Dolly was created with a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which a donor cell (in this case and adult cell from another sheep) has the nucleus removed that is then transfered into an unfertilized egg cell (an oocyte) which in turn has had its cell nucleus removed to make way for the donor nucleus. The host cell is then stimulated and implanted into a host sheep for gestation. Although other animals had been cloned before Dolly, Dolly is celebrated as the first ‘clone’ because her donor cell came from an adult cell.
The word cloneentered English as a noun used in botany in 1903 from the Ancient Greek word klon(κλον) meaning a twigorspray, related to klados(κλαδος) meaning a sprout, young offshoot, branch. Botanists used the word to describe the results of the techique of grafting a shoot of one plant or tree onto another. The word clone(verb) wasn’t used until 1959, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that clone was used in connnection with animals and humans. Since Dolly, scientists have successfully clonedmany other animals, including pigs, horses, goats, and deer.
Image of ‘v’ graft courtesy ghadjikyriacou, via flickr, used with permission under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.
George Church is a professor of Genetics at Harvard University and one of the world’s leading geneticists. He recently published a book with Ed Regis called Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. Church and his team are using CRISPR, a gene editing technology, to insert parts of mammoth DNA into the Asian elephant genome. Ideally, this one day result in a whole population of cold-resistant, hairy pachyderms suited for life in the arctic–animals that are physically, behaviorally, and genetically very similar to the extinct woolly mammoth. This interview has been edited and condensed for length.
How is your lab hoping to make a mammoth embryo?
People go into the Siberian ice to get mammoth remains, and you can get broken DNA, and you can use a sequencing device to turn that into a computer data version of the mammoth genome. You put all the little parts together to make a complete mammoth genome, or you can take important parts of the genome and put them on an Asian elephant’s DNA. Then we put the sequence into an Asian elephant’s egg and get it to start multiplying.
In what ways will the mammoth be different from an elephant?
Reblogging my interview with George Church because mammoth resurrection is back in the news. I have to point out that, while cloning mammoths appears to be trending, not a lot has changed. Except, Church now says that he wouldn’t want to use an elephant to gestate a mammoth fetus, he’d want to use an artificial womb, if anyone ever invents one. Specifically, a womb large and effective enough to gestate a baby pachyderm for more than a year.
This week we focus on personal identity. And today we discuss the sameness of clones.
Let’s go.
Personal identity
PhilosopherJohn Locke argued that a person goes where their consciousness goes; their personhood consists in things like memories. Therefore, a person must be able to extend their consciousness backwards to past events to be the person presently who experienced them.
Some absurdities arise, however. Why trust memories to solidly define us? I might have a genuine belief that I am Ash Ketchum but, alas, I am not ☹ And what if I was asleep or drunk, beyond memory collection: was I really not there? Still, there is something interesting going on here, for wherea person is apparently situated is in their consciousness.
In one of Locke’s examples a prince, via hisconsciousness, is able to enter a cobbler’s body. He takes his ‘princely thoughts’ with him.
Clones
Let’s apply Locke’s view to clones by asking: if a person is cloned, are there two of the same person?
No. Locke would have denied this claim. One’s point of consciousness can move between bodies but ‘the soul’ cannot be in more than one place at once.
This is bad news for a clone: the original soul stays with the host. The clone may faithfully recollect past events and share personality traits. They can live indistinguishably in ignorance. But their life can be deflated with one prick of the truth, with which they will realise that their life is a lie: that there is no organic connection to their memories; that they did not experience those events.
These are truly gutting thoughts to consider. But there is hope in life anew—that is, if we follow Mewtwo in Pokémon: The First Movie(1998):
‘I see now that the circumstances of one’s birth are irrelevant; it is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.’
Cloning imprisons a copy of the soul. However, a unique vantage point is created from which a clone becomes increasingly autonomous. They gather new experiences, forging new memories. Their soul is new. They are original. Their life belongs to them.
Nice one, Mewtwo.
⁂
Some afterthoughts are due.
What is it to be somebody connected through time? After all, our cells die and are recycled, our personalities change, and our memories falter. On what grounds do we persist?
For Locke, bodies are less important for personal identity than psychological states (cf. bodily vs. psychological criteria). Sidestepping accounts of bodily criteria, Lockeans think our identities are born in memories and other features of psychology. Schechtman (2005) argues that self-narratives and elements of unconsciousness play a part too.
In memory we are often misguided. Memories alone, as objects of thought, are residuals of imperfectly recorded events—events which occur infinitesimally in the present and are forever being replaced. Our connections to those memories are loose. They are flimsy. The memories lose their vivaciousness over time.
Moon (2009) is a quietly disturbing sci-fi. Through the crisis of one man we are asked to ponder some deep philosophical questions, not just about him but about ourselves—all without being bombarded with unnecessary action.
Sam Bell’s reality is shaken to its core in Moon. Instead of disregarding an event as a glitch and moving on, Sam follows the scent of suspicion to agitate and uncover something bleak. He marches out to the Moon’s silent and eerie surface and uproots it—for the sake of truth.
Uncomfortable and confounded by the answers he receives, bothered by his subsequent physical and mental decay, we can only watch on and ask: ‘Wasn’t darkness better than the truth?’
⁂
Read more here. There is plenty of philosophy to find therein: ethics, metaphysics, and existentialism. Expect discussions of human cloning, personal identity, and purpose.
(Pictured: Dolly the sheep with her Scottish Blackface surrogate mother. One mother wasn’t enough for Dolly; two others helped bring her into existence, providing the egg and her DNA. Born in 1996, Dolly died in 2003 of a fairly common kind of lung cancer in sheep. She nonetheless lives on (in stuffed form) at the National Museums Scotland, close to home.)
Here’s something to think about in preparation for our next article: how ethical is cloning? Let’s start with non-human animals.
Allow me to introduce Dolly the sheep (left). Born to three mothers (one of whom is on the right) in Scotland in 1996, Dolly was the world’s first ever mammal clone. In the UK cloning for the purposes of scientific research is legal upon application.
But in the aftermath of the Dolly’s cloning The European Union deemed the process to be highly controversial. Representatives said ‘the border was too close between animal cloning and cloning on human being[s]’—the ‘slippery slope argument’.
So human life is too precious to clone; animal life is not? In fairness, self-awareness means cloning threatens our existence in special ways. For example, if you were cloned, there wouldn’t be two of you: such a claim would be a contradiction. There is only one you, to whom no one can be identical. But while a clone cannot share your unique identity and your future experiences, they will be fighting for the same identity as you: a stirring thought. Plus there are ethical concerns even with cloning at the primitive stage of human development. These include the ‘death’ (destruction) of many embryos, which are given the moral status of beings, and steps towards eugenics.
However, there are several avenues down which human cloning serves tangible benefits to society. Cloned embryos can be used to create cells in the development of treatments for currently incurable diseases. Reproductive cloning offers hope of parenthood to infertile individuals, same-sex couples, and couples who cannot produce together, enhancing their dignity and familial liberty and bypassing the need for cell donation.
With science we look for ways to design better quality of lives, perhaps at a moral cost. After Dolly the European Union conceded there’s a debate to be held around human cloning for the purposes of medical research. And there’s precedent: in the US human cloning isn’t completely illegal, depending on where you are, and in the UK experimental stem cell research for treating diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease is legal, as is three-person in vitro fertilisation.
We continue to foresee ways in which cloning will affect our moral outlooks (e.g. in fiction) and, eerily, who we think we are. The reality of human cloning may be far off. But that won’t stop philosophers, story writers, and us from debating moral issues now in preparation for such a time.
20 years ago today - Dolly the sheep was born (5th July 1996)
We take a look at the life of the world’s most famous sheep
Making Dolly
Dolly was part of a series of experiments at The Roslin Institute that were trying to develop a better method for producing genetically modified livestock. If successful, this would mean fewer animals would need to be used in future experiments.
Dolly was cloned from a cell taken from the mammary gland of a sheep, and an egg taken from a Scottish Blackface sheep.
She was born to her Scottish Blackface surrogate mom on 5th July 1996.
Dolly’s white face was one of the first signs that she was a clone because if she was genetically related to her surrogate mother, she would have had a black face.
Because Dolly’s DNA came from a mammary gland cell, she was named after the country singer Dolly Parton.
Why was Dolly so important?
Dolly was important because she was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. Her birth proved that specialised cells could be used to create an exact copy of the animal they came from.
Dolly’s life
Dolly was announced to the world on 22nd February 1997. Dolly captured the public’s imagination - no small feat for a sheep - and sparked a public debate about the possible benefits and dangers of cloning.
In the week that followed the announcement, The Roslin Institute received 3,000 phone calls from around the world.
Dolly spent her life at The Roslin Institute, and apart from the occasional media appearance, led a normal life. Over the years, Dolly had a total of six lambs with a ram called David.
After Dolly gave birth to her last lambs in September 2000, it was discovered that she’d become infected by a virus called JSRV, which causes lung cancer in sheep. Other sheep at The Roslin Institute had also been infected with JSRV in the same outbreak.
Dolly continued to have a normal quality of life until February 2003, when she developed a cough. A CT scan showed tumours in her lungs, and the decision was made to euthanise Dolly rather than risk her suffering. Dolly was put to sleep on 14th February 2003, at the age of six.
What made Dolly so special is that she had been made from an adult cell, which no-one at the time thought was possible. This knowledge changed what scientists thought was possible and opened up a lot of possibilities in biology and medicine.
A rare photo of the clone of Celia, the last surviving Pyrenean ibex (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica, also called the bucardo). Sadly, the clone died minutes after birth due to lung defects, but her birth in 2009 represents the first time an animal has ever been brought back from extinction.
This Channel Posts EVERY SUNDAY!✅ here is the entire Cannabis grow lifecycle from clone to harvest. I go over everything from the beginning and take you all the way through until the end and even weigh up the results of this indoor closet grow which uses LED grow lights and organic dry amendment nutrients. This video goes into in…
Cosmos atrosanguineus, chocolate cosmos. This species of cosmos is extinct in the wild. It exists as a clone, which is propagated by division of the tubers.
