How a horse whisperer can help engineers build better robots

by Karen Dooley, University of Florida, 24 April 2023 • Note: AI in this case stands for Artificial Intelligence HUMANS AND HORSES have enjoyed a strong working relationship for nearly 10,000 years—a partnership that transformed how food was produced, people were transported and even how wars were fought and won. Today, we look to horses for…

Custom made horses

Argentine scientists have edited the genes in an equine embryo, which may allow them to create horses with customized DNA. Dr. Natalia Lucia led the team that used the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) technique to genetically alter the cells that then were used to create edited cloned embryos, reports EQUUS magazine.  CRISPR uses…

Ancient DNA bucks take on how the horse was tamed

DNA from 2,000-year-old stallions is helping rewrite the story of horse domestication. Ancient domesticated horses had much more genetic diversity than their present-day descendants do, researchers report in the April 28 Science. In particular, these ancient horses had many more varieties of Y chromosomes and fewer harmful mutations than horses do now. Previous studies based…