You got an opener?
Well, I have an opener, but this is for our midweek pickup.
I know, yes.
OK, I'm sticking with my new format.
So we have your choice for the feel good midweek pickup.
We have feel good stories, which include UFOs,
because they make us feel good.
We have feel bad, now with even more bad news.
And the bad news is now outweighing the good news stories.
And we have uncertain feelings.
Science is gone.
You said for our feel good midweek,
I'm actually going to go with neutral.
Feel neutral.
OK, let's feel neutral.
Feeling neutral today.
I need to read that in a different category, because it's not.
Because it was not neutral.
It was not neutral.
OK, let's go with this one.
This one is from crunch.com.
And it is titled, cultured meat firm,
resurrects woolly mammoth in lab grown meatball.
May have heard this floating around the internet recently.
And it does go along with a little bit ago now.
We covered a woolly mammoth, so I thought it would be nice to do,
because we're feeling neutral.
Truth, as the saying goes, is often stranger than fiction.
The very notion of resurrecting the long extinct woolly mammoth
was the stuff of fantasy not that long ago.
The scientists are already working on ways
to achieve something close to that,
using DNA from soft tissue and frozen mammoth remains,
and meshing it with that of modern day elephant.
A modern day elephant, if you're using proper English,
as most articles do.
But while such de-extinction projects
may or may not ultimately succeed,
one company is already laying claim
to having produced the first meat product made from mammoth DNA.
Vow, an Australian cultivated food company
that creates meat in a laboratory setting from animal cells,
says that it has used advanced molecular engineering
to resurrect the woolly mammoth in meatball form,
by combining original mammoth DNA with fragments
of African elephants DNA.
Sturbin. Yeah. Yeah, very.
James Ryle, Vow's chief science officer,
said that the company first identified the mammoth bioglobin,
a protein that is key to giving meat its color and taste,
and then use publicly available data
to identify the DNA sequence in mammoths.
It filled in any gaps in the DNA sequence
of this mammoth's myoglobin gene
by using the genome of the African elephant,
the mammoth's closest living relative.
Ryle said in a video announcing the mammoth meatball,
we inserted the mammoth myoglobin gene into our cells
using a very low current and high voltage charge.
And we continued to grow and multiply these cells
just as would occur in a mammoth thousands of years ago.
And the amazing thing about this
is not a single animal needed to die
to produce the mammoth meatball.
Well, all of the mammoths had to die.
It's true. Because it pushed us to do this.
It's true.
There's little question that cultivated meat is coming.
Evidence by the countless companies raising vast swaths
of venture capital funding to produce meat and fish
in a lab from animal cells,
as well as the fact that companies are now starting
to receive the blessings of regulators,
such as the US Food and Drug Administration,
while pork sausages and seafood make sense.
Insofar as they are food that people are familiar with,
Vow, which closed of 49.2 million round of funding
just a few months ago is clearly upping the ante
with its foray into the world of extinct animals.
It goes on, I think this gives you the feel good sense.
The ill-neutral.
Yeah, to feel the neutral sense to get through your week.
I was feeling optimistic with the feel good.
You're right. This is neutral, actually.
I am at least happy that we kind of just
skipped the step of creating the woolly mammoth
so that we could eat the woolly mammoth.
Because again, if you haven't listened to it in a while,
go listen to our de-extinction episode.
It turns out really one of the main reasons
we want to bring a woolly mammoth back
is because historically we have always wanted
to eat woolly mammoth.
And it wasn't this that we talked about
in the woolly mammoth episode.
But we did talk about wanting to eat them,
which is odd because there's so many different animals
you probably could have done this with that are extinct.
Oh, and probably more delicious too.
But we really want to know what the woolly mammoth tastes like.
But elephants are everywhere.
And you don't see people clamoring to try elephant.
Now, technically, yeah, they're an endangered species
and not as prominent as they once were
and also very hard to farm.
But it's weird the obsession with eating woolly mammoth,
that there is historical record of how much we obsessed
about eating woolly mammoth, which is super weird.
But not elephants.
I wonder how good this product would do
if you actually went to the store and saw woolly mammoth meat.
Or if it would change your wantingness to try woolly mammoth
meat when they're like they bridge the gap with elephant.
I mean, woolly mammoth and...
Can you imagine like going into a steakhouse
and asking for like woolly mammoth balls
and like, sorry, oh, we got the elephant.
You're like, no, no, not interested at all.
That's crossing the line.
That's the same restaurant that only has Pepsi as well.
Why are people even there then?
Yeah, Pepsi and elephants.
We're coming into a strange place in science, I feel like.
We really are.
And I'm actually worried we are going to jump past
de-extincting the woolly mammoth
because we can get its meat this way.
That's the only reason we would want to bring it back anyway
is to see how it tastes.
Yeah.
There's so many questions I have.
First one is the people testing this, eating this.
Are they like, that's exactly what I thought
a woolly mammoth would taste like?
I'm actually kind of upset they didn't put anything in there
about it because they've made it.
They didn't describe the food at all.
I don't think so because I stopped early,
but I don't think.
Let me quick search taste.
No, we already read that part, both the proteins.
It is believed that nobody has actually tasted one
of the mammoth balls.
Wait, what?
This isn't the first time scientists
have created edibles from extinct animals.
Oh, we've spoke wrong.
I spoke wrong.
Back in 2018, a VC-backed silicone valley startup called Geltr
made gummies using protein of a mastodon,
another distant relative of elephants.
However, in the latest instance, it's
believed that nobody has actually tasted one
of the mammoth meatballs.
OK, we should have just continued reading.
Why?
Because it says it suggested that it's probably just not
safe to try the meatballs just now, even if regularly
it's permitted.
Because we haven't seen this protein for thousands of years.
I guess I wasn't done reading the article, guys.
Wolvetang says we don't know who he is
because I skipped to some part.
I'm not even sure where we are in the article.
But it's important.
So we have no idea how our immune system would
react when we eat it.
But if we did it again, we would certainly
do it in a way that would make it more palatable
to regulatory bodies.
Mammoth Meatball is set to be officially unveiled at Nemo
Science Museum in the Netherlands today.
Not like today, today.
This was March 28, 2023.
So recent enough, that's the actual end of the article.
Yeah, I am actually really looking forward
to our year-end update because I'm really
hoping somebody tries to eat this by that point.
Maybe we are ready for a protein that's
been extinct for a long time.
We're also really pushing the lab-made meats
in recent history, I guess, which I also
find special.
Actually, Chelsea, you're vegetarian, or at least
pescatarian.
Would you consider lab-grown meat part of your diet?
If it was out there, would you think that vegetarians
could eat it?
It's a really interesting moral debate, I think.
I don't see anything wrong with vegetarians or vegan
eating it because it's not coming from an animal.
It has no sentience.
I feel like I wouldn't want to eat it, though,
because I personally don't like the texture of meat.
I haven't eaten meat in so long.
I don't like that texture.
So it wouldn't be something I'd be like, man,
I could really go for a steak now that I can eat steak,
and it doesn't come from an animal that has feelings.
OK.
It's just my thought on it.
OK.
Yeah.
I think that's it for our little flow for the week.
Well, I am very curious about this in AI just
seem to be going so fast right now that I'm curious to see
just how they develop.
But with that, let's get into the rest of the week,
and we'll see you all on Friday.
Bye.