TV News LIES

It's a Wednesday morning at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in downtown Washington, D.C., and Dr. Eli Adashi is opening an unprecedented gathering: It's titled "In-Vitro Derived Human Gametes as a Reproductive Technology."

It's the academy's first workshop to explore in-vitro gametogenesis, or IVG, which involves custom-making human eggs and sperm in the laboratory from any cell in a person's body.

"It is on the precipice of materialization," says Adashi, a reproductive biology specialist from Brown University. "And IVF will probably never be the same."

For the next three days, dozens of scientists, bioethicists, doctors, and others describe the latest scientific advances in IVG and explore the potentially far-reaching thicket of social, ethical, moral, legal and regulatory ramifications of the emerging technology. Hundreds more attend the workshop remotely.

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A possible meteorite crashed into a bedroom of a New Jersey home, puncturing a hole into the roof and leaving residents rattled, though they were not home at the time.

The metallic object in the Monday incident looks like a shiny rock, about 4in by 6in, police in Hopewell Township said.

The rock appeared to crash through the house, hit a hardwood floor then “ricochet up” to the ceiling, where it created another hole before falling back to the ground.

Suzy Kop said the object fell through the roof of her father’s bedroom around 1p.m.

Scientists have used a new method for extracting ancient DNA to identify the owner of a 20,000-year-old pendant fashioned from an elk’s canine tooth.

The method can isolate DNA that was present in skin cells, sweat or other body fluids and was absorbed by certain types of porous material including bones, teeth and tusks when handled by someone thousands of years ago.

Objects used as tools or for personal adornment – pendants, necklaces, bracelets, rings and the like – can offer insight into past behaviour and culture, though our understanding has been limited by an inability to tie a particular object to a particular person.

Many people discovered new interests closer to home as a result of Covid-19 lockdowns. For Dr Joseph Botting and Dr Lucy Muir, it was a 10-metre-wide quarry in a sheep field near to their home in Llandrindod, central Wales, which appeared to be teeming with tiny fossils.

Now researchers believe the site could help plug gaps in scientific understanding of how evolution proceeded after the Cambrian explosion – the period when the ancestors of most modern animals are believed to have evolved. It could even prove to be as important as the Burgess Shale in Canada that preserves one of the world’s first complex marine ecosystems, experts say.

The Welsh site, known as Castle Bank, dates from the Middle Ordovician period, about 460m-70m years ago. It represents a community of diverse and mostly diminutive (1mm to 5mm in body length) marine organisms that existed at a time when ocean covered what is now mid-Wales.

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