Friday, December 23, 2011

Mad scientist update

While everyone is getting slightly worried that scientists have been busy creating killer bird flu, I note on a smaller scale that this photo appears in Nature's slideshow of striking images from 2011:


 And the explanation:

Rats don’t deserve their bad name, but this ball of fury won’t win over many murophobes. Russian scientists bred this aggressive rat strain to compare it with more docile creatures in a study on domestication that has teased out several genetic regions linked to tame traits.

Great.  All we need now is for them to escape and be capable of carrying killer bird flu, and we've got bio-apocalypse for Christmas.

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