Fish that fake orgasms. Fruit flies that seek out alcohol when they can’t find mates. Crows that take advantage of moving vehicles to crack open walnuts. Are these rote animal behaviors, or signs of something approaching consciousness?

Such is the focus of a provocative meditation on animal intelligence by Ross Andersen in the March. . .   Read More

Harvard geneticist George Church, who is leading efforts to de-extinct the woolly mammoth, explores a cave in Siberia. Photo by Brendan Hall. There will be three long flights across 15 time zones before I sleep in a bed, and we still won’t be there. Our destination is vastly closer to where we start than the path […]

Tim Ferriss, who wrote the The Four Hour Work Week and gave a Long Now talk on accelerated learning in 02011, recently interviewed Long Now co-founder Stewart Brand on his podcast, “The Tim Ferriss Show”. The interview is wide-ranging, in-depth, and among the most personal Brand has given to date. Over the. . .   Read More

In 01872, California Governor Leland Stanford hired the famed photographer Eadweard Muybridge to settle a question of popular debate—whether all four of a horse’s feet ever left the ground when it galloped. The resulting series of photographs, Sallie Gardner at a Gallop, showed without a doubt that horses do indeed go airborne at. . .   Read More

For over 100,000 years, wide swaths of the northern part of the globe were covered in grasslands where millions of bison, horses, and woolly mammoths grazed. Known as the Mammoth Steppe, it was the world’s most extensive biome, stretching from Spain to Canada, with more animal biomass than the African Savannah. With the. . .   Read More

On June 25 and 26, 2015, a meeting was held at the International Centre for Life in Newcastle, England, to discuss whether the extinct Great Auk–a once-common flightless pelagic bird known as “the penguin of the north”–might be a realistic candidate for bringing back to life using recent breakthroughs in genetic technology. . .   Read More

On November 18 02015, Ryan Phelan, Executive Director of Revive and Restore, will be speaking at the Fuller Symposium in Washington D.C. on how recent advances in biotech can aid conservation efforts.
This event is free, and can be viewed online via its live stream or in person in Washington D.C. on November. . .   Read More

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

How to Clone a Mammoth
Monday May 11, 02015 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Shapiro Seminar page.
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Audio is up on the Shapiro Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.
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De-extinction science. . .   Read More

Revive & Restore Unveils Open Genomics for Conservation Initiative
Revive & Restore is embarking on its first open-access science initiative – Ferreting the Genome: Open Genomics for Conservation. The initiative will enlist the help of the public to understand how the black-footed ferret gene pool has changed from the founding population to the current. . .   Read More

photo by Catherine Borgeson Visitors to The Interval can now view two stunning passenger pigeon specimens on loan from the Royal Ontario Museum. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) houses the world’s largest collection of passenger pigeons. These specimens showcase the species’ unique male and female coloration and beauty. The passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) once lived […]