Koreans produce $3m glow-in-the-dark dog
It's been five long years since Taiwanese boffins brewed up a glow-in-the-dark pig, but one Reg reader's prayers* for the ultimate pet have finally appear to have been answered in the form of a fluorescent mutt. According to Reuters, a Seoul National University team led by Lee Byeong-chun has sucessfully bred a GM beagle female …
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Should... stop... programming at night
I misread as "3m glow-in-the-dark log."
Wel....
Late night coding session, chewing on those Post-It notes in the office 'cos the shops are shut has got have some nasty side effects when they get through the system!
Does this mean that Koreans...
...will have glow in the dark poo now?
Already happens ...
Just eat enough kim chi (speaking from experience here!).
Screw that
Gentlemen ! We must not allow... a glow in the dark dog gap !
Screw austerity ! All the nation's resources must be committed to achieving parity with those shifty Koreans in glow in the dark tech.
Onward to victory comrades !
Racial stereotype incoming...
At last, when going for a midnight snack it will no longer matter if the bulb has gone in the fridge!
only if
you your fridge also has an ultraviolet light and that one is still on.
Should make...
...eating dinner in dimly lit Korean restaurants much easier...
@david 63
Although, I'd be slightly suspicious when the food glows...
Spicy
Korean food glows from the sheer amount of chili they use ...
Title
It seems like a lot of effort to go to just to make dramatisations of 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' a bit cheaper.
Sod the dogs.
I still reckon that glow-in-the-dark seagulls is the way to go.
Release a few around Sellafield and there's gotta be at least 3m quids worth of ROFLMAO in the headlines, ensuing fracas and mass outbreak of self-righteous "We told you so"ing from the luddites that would inevitably cause.
Re seagulls around Sellafield
Aren't they glowing already?!
(Now for something completely different. Let's have some of those in Japan...)
Dog is not as useful for disease research
Pigs are much closer to humans in all departments except lungs. For the latter you need goats.
So if the goal of this research is really research into diseases a fluorescent goat would have been most welcome.
No pics
The reason might be because the dog does not exactly look like a dog. More like a cubic sponge which will glow when drenched with antibiotics.
Rover the cubic sponge
Still sounds like an awesome pet ...
They should make one with
just glow in the dark teeth. That'd really scare teh burglarz
As a publisher of scientific material...
I say pics or it didn't happen.
Glow in the dark
Obviously, this is just a first step towards creating glow-in-the-dark humans!
Dave
Fluorescent?
But will it lase if you hit it with a sufficently bright flash? *That* would make a helluva guard dog.
Don't need lasers to scare you.
Splice the gene into your favorite guard dog breed, and then put some UV lights around the building you want to protect.
A snarling German Shepherd is unnerving at the best of times, but when they're on the pursuit barking their brains out while glowing all eerie and eldritch - well, then you can tell the burglars by the colour of their pants.
The Case of the Counterfeit Kebabs
This will be handy for proving the provenance of the produce with a UV light.
My head hurts
Uhm... great an' all, but how can they say it "glows in the dark" when you have to expose the mutt to ultraviolet light before it glows?
Shurely it's more 'reflective' than 'glowing'? Less catchy catchphrase, I do agree.
Technically it 'flouresces'.
That is, it absorbs UV radiation and immediately re-transmits the energy as visible light. So no, it doesn't glow on its own. 'Phosphorescence' is when something stores the energy and re-transmits it at a slower rate, which is what toy ghosts and things do.
Though it does mean that chemical activation/de-activation is a bit of a waste of time when you could just use the switch on a UV lamp to control it. But I think the point is the ability to do a controllable genetic splice.
title here
Yes, the really great news is that they can insert a gene that can then be easily switched on or off. This ability is extremely valuable for research. They picked the fluorescence gene because it's really easy to see if it's working, but the fluorescence itself isn't the important bit.
Maybe a mistranslation
The dog in question actually *grows* when bathed in UV light.
// it's the one with the fluorescent lining, thanks
Mass production will bring the price down
They will soon be on sale over here for a few hundred quid.
Quickly followed by counterfeit Chinese versions which have just been washed with shampoo that shows up under ultraviolet light (or being Chines more likely infra red). Hang on a minute, how do we know this guy is the real McCoy? Didn' t some other Korean Phd cheat on his cloning test? I bet this dog has just been sprayed with the stuff that you find in washing powder that makes your whites look white under ultra violet light.
The most important question is still unanswered...
Does it taste like chicken?
I, for one,
welcome our new glow-in-the-dark canine overloads.
hmmm
Can we apply this to politicians , so they light up when they lie . The bigger the lie the brighter they get .
That does have merit
We could replace street lights with a soapbox and a politician. The only problem is around election time I’d suspect you would need welding goggles to ensure you aren’t blinded by the intensity of the light
"substituted with genes that trigger fatal human diseases"
The perfect Ninja attack weapon. Give the killer mutt to your enemy and go off on a business trip while arranging to have said hound fed with the special doggy treats converting it into a lethal biological weapon.
Alternatively the perfect gift for parents who suspect their offspring have too short an attention span to cope with a pet. Once they get bored slip fido the antibiotic and instant drama, leading to the vet being the bad guy as "There's nothing we can do to save him."
OTOH perhaps he just meant this gives researchers a better tool to control *when* a disease is expressed in their experimental subjects and (perhaps *more* interestingly) if you "switch off" expression does the condition go away?
I suspect that like German Korean is quite precise but the translations can sound a bit brutal.
"...doxycycline antibiotic..."
Why don't they just use LSD to turn their dogs on like everyone else?
What about
Growing me a labrador sized elephant. I want one!!!!
@kain preacher
We'd all go blind, and I don't mean from masturbation.
Hey
I never said we would let the politicians roam free. The added benefit of them glowing so bright is that they would be dangerous to little kids eyes. Therefore we need to thinking of the kids. We need to lock the politicians away, have them tagged chipped and registered (like cattle). All for the safety of the kids.
Up next make anyone who says think of the kids and comes up with some asinine to follow glow to . Oh and I'm sure you folks could harvest all of that glowing energy too.
Good news for Corby and Hull
Can the glow-in-the-dark duck be far behind?
http://scarygoround.com/sgr/ar.php?date=20020903
(OK, Tim's invention was the phosphorescent waterfowl, and this dog is merely common-or-garden florescent, as has been noted above. But still we may hope!)
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