Sunday 7 March 2010

Mammoth undertaking

Is it possible to bring extinct species back to life? I've just listened to a fascinating podcast on the subject - Schöpfung, zweiter Versuch - Das Mammut kehrt zurück.

Sie streiften in riesigen Herden über die Steppen der Nordhalbkugel, bis sie vor 10.000 Jahren, am Ende der Eiszeit, plötzlich verschwanden. Für immer, so glaubte man. Doch was, wenn es Wege gäbe, sie wiederauferstehen zu lassen?

What I heard was the second of two podcasts from the Deutschlandfunk series, Wissenschaft im Brennpunkt. I regularly download these from the RSS feed for the series but each is about 30 minutes long so quite demanding to listen to and I tend to be a couple of months behind with my listening fitting it in when I’m doing something else, like ironing my shirts. I quite enjoy listening to reports like this as they make scientific subjects reasonably accessible. What I had not previously realised was that if you click on the title above the blurb from the RSS feed you get the text for the whole programme. That does make it much easier to check out parts that were of particular interest and also to do some vocabulary work. The links for the two programmes are here Teil 1 - Teil 2 Instead of subscribing to the RSS feed you could look at the  recent programmes listing.

While I'm fascinated by the research being done, and this report includes something of the work of George Church, I'm not certain about the desirability of bringing extinct species back to life. Sind Sie für oder gegen?

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