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Tag: genetics

AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki

Chinese Scientist Plans to Clone a Million Cows per Year

A Chinese company called Boyalife Genomics is planning to open a factory the size of three football fields in Tianjin this year, and what they’ll be manufacturing is… cows. Clone cows. 100,000 of them per year to start, but company founder Xiao-Chun Xu dreams of cranking that production level up to a million per year.

Dairy farmers, Anthony Paudoie and his father Jean-Louis, harvest wheat in a field with their harvester on July 14, 2014 at a farm of Le Pin, near Nantes, western France. The Loire Atlantique department is the second milk producer in France with 840 million liters of milk per year.

The Big Ratchet: How to Feed a Hungry Planet

In her book The Big Ratchet, Ruth DeFries explains how humanity went from hunger to plenty by making more efficient use of Earth’s resources. Even with more people than ever before, “Our current problems are more about abundance than about lack of food. Our species has never had to grapple with such surplus,” she writes.

DNA

Genome-Altering Scientific Breakthrough Ignites Ethics Debate

In what is being dubbed “the most important new genetic engineering technique since the beginning of the biotechnology age in the 1970s,” scientists have made an enormous breakthrough in editing human genetic material. The possibilities of the technology are so vast that scientists themselves are already calling for ethical discussion and restraint.