A face only a mother could love?

One of the world’s leading geneticists has announced that he is to bring the Neanderthal man back to life, and all he needs is one female willing to be its birth mother.

The primitive Neanderthal man has been extinct for 33,000 years, but Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School believes that he can change all that with the use of genetic code.

Professor Church’s in-depth analysis of Neanderthal genetic code using bone samples from bones is detailed enough that he now believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA. However, he needs the assistance of a woman willing to act as a surrogate to the ‘child’.

“Now I need an adventurous female human. It depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think it can be done,” The Daily Mail reported the scientist as saying.

If a volunteer can be found, Professor Church would start the process by artificially creating Neanderthal DNA based around the genetic codes that have been discovered in fossil remains. This DNA would then be put into stem cells and injected into cells from a human embryo.

The ‘neo-Neanderthal’ embryo would then be implanted into a surrogate mother’s womb.

“They could even be more intelligent than us,” said Professor Church, who believes that the plans could benefit humankind.

“When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet, it’s conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial,” he went on to say.

However, Philippa Taylor of the Christian Medical Fellowship said, “It is hard to know where to begin with the ethical and safety concerns.”

The giant eyeball found on a Florida beach. Credit: The Sun Sentinel

A mystery has been unravelling in recent days after a giant eyeball was discovered on a beach in Florida.

Gino Covacci discovered the item while out for a stroll on Pompano Beach, north of Ft. Lauderdale in the US Sunshine State. At first nobody could work out what kind of creature the eyeball came from, its size prompted a number of people to suggest it belonged to a mysterious deep-sea animal.

Mr Covacci told local paper the Sun Sentinel: “It was very, very fresh. It was still bleeding when I put in it the plastic bag.”

We’d love to say that the discovery led scientists to uncover a freaky new deep-sea creature, but the eyeball has been seen by marine biologists who have now revealed that it probably belonged to a large swordfish. Such fish can grow as large as 1,400 pounds so it is perfectly possible that the eye – which is a little bigger than a baseball – originally belonged to one of these knights of the sea.

Joan Herrera, curator of collections at the FWC’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. said in a statement: “Experts on site and remotely have viewed and analysed the eye, and based on its colour, size and structure, along with the presence of bone around it, we believe the eye came from a swordfish.”

She added: “Based on straight-line cuts visible around the eye, we believe it was removed by a fisherman and discarded.”

Genetic tests will now be conducted to find conclusive proof that the eyeball was that of a swordfish. Or not …