A Copy, Sort Of

On this day:

1397
Geoffrey Chaucer tells the Canterbury Tales for the first time at the court of Richard II. Chaucer scholars have also identified this date (in 1387) the start of the book’s pilgrimage to Canterbury.
1897
The Aurora, Texas UFO incident
1912
Russian troops open fire on striking goldfield workers in northeast Siberia, killing at least 150.
1946
Syria obtains its Independence from the French occupation.
1961
Bay of Pigs Invasion: A group of CIA-financed and trained Cuban exiles lands at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, intending to oust Fidel Castro.
1969
Sirhan Sirhan is convicted of assassinating Robert F. Kennedy.
1970
Apollo program: The ill-fated Apollo 13 spacecraft returns to Earth safely.
1986
The Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years’ War between the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly ends. Ah, Europe.

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Racial equity plans don’t build generational wealth—they redistribute resentment. They don’t heal historical wounds—they reopen them for political profit.--Chin

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In 1897, in Arora, Texas, a flying metal craft crashed into a local windmill. The debris was unlike anything the townspeople had ever encountered—pieces of a strange, lightweight metal that was both strong and heat-resistant. As they sifted through the wreckage, they discovered something even more shocking: the body of a small humanoid figure, mangled and lifeless, lying among the twisted remnants of the craft.

Or so it is said.


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An Obama-era loophole later expanded under Biden allows Chinese nationals to travel visa-free to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory. Pregnant women have exploited this policy to give birth on U.S. soil and secure American citizenship for their children.


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Ukraine’s defenders have invented an entirely new way of war that’s costing Russia massively in blood and treasure to advance even a few yards at a time — and Kyiv’s “robot” forces are getting ever better.
Zelensky says autonomous systems have participated in over 22,000 frontline missions — sparing human casualties — these last three months, a period that’s seen Moscow driven back on multiple fronts.

For the first time in the history of this war, Ukrainian warriors captured an enemy position using exclusively unmanned platforms,” President Volodymyr Zelensky boasted to defense workers the other day.

Actually, it was the first time in history, period, that entirely remote-controlled robotic systems captured an enemy position, with no help from human infantry. (nypost)

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A Copy, Sort Of

Current thinking is that studies show cloning is not what we thought. It is not the predictable, reproducible carbon-copy of a genetically identical precursor.

There are simply many more mutations in clones than in normally produced individuals. It could just be that the adult body cells being cloned accumulate more mutations than egg or sperm cells do. But Teruhiko Wakayama at Yamanashi University in Japan thinks the cloning process itself could be causing at least some of them.

A clone is meant to be a genetically identical copy, but a 20-year study has shown that this isn’t, in fact, the case. It reveals that clones have many extra mutations and, if you keep cloning clones, these build up to fatal levels. The findings have implications for the use of cloning in farming and for saving endangered animals, including efforts to recreate extinct species, as well as for the potential use of cloning technology in people.

“Unfortunately, however, while clones were once thought to be identical to the original, it has become clear that this is not the case, suggesting that there may be issues with their use,” Wakayama says. “Going forward, we need to demonstrate that mutations arising from cloning do not pose problems.”

Or, put another way, what are we doing?