Simple Science simplifies the past week in science news. This week in science we discuss 2023 being named the hottest year on record and the second birthday of a cloned monkey from Scotland.
2023 was a scorcher
2023 was officially the hottest year on record. The average global temperature was 2.12℉ above the 20th-century average, according to both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.
This beats the previous record, set in 2016, by 0.27 degrees.
Not only was 2023 the hottest year ever, but July 2023 was also the hottest month ever recorded by NASA. In states like Arizona and New Mexico, this meant a two-degree increase from average temperatures. India, China and Canada also faced record-breaking heat waves and wildfires in July.
The oppressive heat can be credited to man-made climate change, which was only exacerbated by El Niño. El Niño is the warming of surface waters in the Pacific Ocean. The warm water makes its way east to the American west coast. This phenomenon causes a strange contrast in the Americas. While the North becomes dry and warm, the South faces increased flooding and harsher storms. Human activity has caused this event to occur more frequently, including in 2023.
Not-so-fun fact: Heat is the number one cause of weather-related fatalities in the U.S., especially in lower-income neighborhoods and in communities of color, which is why scientists have been scrambling to adhere to the goals of the Paris Agreement, the global agreement aims to combat our changing climate.
The most notable goal of the agreement is to “limit the temperature increase and the global average temperatures to 2.7℉ above pre-industrial levels,” by 2100.
Whether or not this goal is reached, 2023 will go down in history as a scorching hot year.
Barrel of (cloned) monkeys
In other news, scientists have successfully raised a cloned rhesus monkey to adulthood, an achievement that is unheard of in this species. However, animal cloning is not as futuristic a process as it seems.
A similar case, Dolly the sheep, born in 1996 to three mothers, was the product of somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT. SCNT is a technique developed to clone mammals. During this process, a nucleus, from a body cell, is implanted into an egg cell to create a viable embryo. Dolly was created by The Roslin Institute at The University of Edinburgh in Scotland using an adult cell.
Despite being the most popular, Dolly was not the first mammal to be cloned with the SCNT technique. That title belongs to a group of northern leopard frog tadpoles, born in 1953 and produced by biologists Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King Jr. However, these tadpoles grew abnormally and died days after their birth.
In contrast, Dolly lived for seven years before dying from lung disease, a malady unrelated to her cloning. Dolly marks the inception of long-term successful animal cloning. Since then, dogs, cats and cattle have all been cloned by SCNT, with little long-term success.
However, a cloned rhesus monkey officially reached adulthood for the first time this month; a novel achievement for this species. Affectionately known as ReTro, this monkey’s survival is critical to further medical research.
Combining the SCNT embryos with placentas from another technique, known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or ICSI, researchers were able to produce viable embryos. ReTro was the sole survivor of 113 cloned embryos initially implanted into seven surrogate rhesus monkeys. ReTro became the only monkey to survive until birth.
Animal cloning has the potential to preserve endangered species and enhance medical research. It should be noted that there are also concerns about the ethics of cloning related to animal welfare. Cloned animals are used in research to model diseases and test drugs, a process that may lead to medical discoveries beneficial for humans.
To learn more about ReTro the cloned monkey, read the study here.
Other notable news:
For space fans: A new image of a black hole
