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Doom. It surrounds, envelops us, ensconces us, seeps deep inside us, emanating seemingly from everywhere.
Global warming, asteroid strikes, war, strife, the impetuousness of the Sun God Ra, who brings drought and blight upon this nation’s western half. What the world doesn’t need is more doom.
Don’t tell that to science, though, because right now they are trying to engineer chickens to have their beaks look like velociraptors and … … …
I don’t fucking know. Spit in the face of Jesus Christ, that’s for damn certain. From Live Science:
To learn more about how the beak evolved, a research team led by [Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, a paleontologist and developmental biologist at Yale University] and developmental biologist Arkhat Abzhanov at Harvard University have now successfully reverted the beaks of chicken embryos into snouts more similar to ones seen in Velociraptor and Archaeopteryx than in birds.
Oh. … To learn about … evolution? Yea, you really are taking a shit on Christianity just for fun, are you not, science?
I mean. You are giving a chicken a dinosaur nose.
How is this going to end well?
“The experimental animals did not have a beak, instead developing a broad, rounded snout,” Bhullar said. However, “they still lacked teeth, and possessed a horny covering on the snout.”
These embryos did not live to hatch, researchers stressed. “They could have,” Bhullar said. “They actually probably wouldn’t have done that badly if they did hatch. Mostly, though, we were interested in the evolution of the beak, and not in hatching a ‘dino-chicken’ just for the sake of it.”
So you just gave some chickens some dinosaur snouts then offed them before they even hatched? Playing fucking God is fucking right. Don’t play God, Bros.
Although the science behind it is pretty dang cool.
The researchers focused on two genes that help control the development of the middle of the face. The activity of these genes differed from that of reptiles early in embryonic development. They developed molecules that suppressed the activity of the proteins that these genes produced, which led to the embryos developing snouts that resembled their ancestral dinosaur state.
The researchers stressed that they are not yet capable of genetically modifying chickens to make them resemble their dinosaur ancestors.
“But soon,” they probably added, tapping their fingers together. “Soon.”