Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Cloning Lady Liberty

By

tree, lady liberty, cypress,
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Most of us know about the statue of liberty just south of Manhattan. There’s another Lady Liberty in the US, and she’s much older than the brass woman welcoming huddled masses from the east. This senior Lady Liberty is a 2400-year-old cypress tree, and a nonprofit organization wants to create more just like her.

The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive wants to create a living genetic library. On December 28 the organization collected a sample of the 89-foot tall, 10-feet diameter and 32-foot circumference bald cypress of Big Tree Park in Longwood, Seminole County Florida. This follows the death of its 3,500-year-old cousin, the Senator that was destroyed in a fire in 2012. After the Senator burned down, the forest service began to more carefully monitor Lady Liberty. Unfortunately, analysis revealed that it’s likely LL will die within the next five years.

Recommended Videos

Seminole County’s natural-lands program manager, Jim Duby said in a statement, “Having what happened to the Senator, we cannot sit back and not do anything.”

Related

To defend from the loss of the bald cypress genetic line to which the Senator and Lady Liberty belong, Archangel Ancient Tree Archive asked to step in and propagate Lady Liberty. Samples will be used to grow clones that will help with research and reforestation in coming years. Its extreme age is thought to be a sign of superior genetics well worth preservation.

“We believe that this tree is something special. Throughout time, it has seen droughts and disease, and over time, it has acquired or developed the DNA to withstand those things.” Jake Milarch of Archangel told Nature World News.

Archangel Clones Lady Liberty

The process of cloning plants isn’t nearly as challenging as it is with mammals, obviously. It’s also known as vegetative propagation, and some plants like strawberries do it naturally. Archangel aims to create up to 100 clones of the iconic cypress.

Once Lady Liberty’s clones are of sufficient height and girth, some will be added to the living archive, while others will be replanted at the site. Additional clones will be donated to schools and organizations in Florida.

Archangel Ancient Tree Archive planted the first “super grove” in Oregon to maintain the legacy of the oldest and largest redwoods. In 2011, the nonprofit organization performed similar work in Ireland, where the group collected 130 of the country’s oldest trees and reintroduced them to the landscape. In 2004, they cloned one of the last original trees from George Washington’s estate. So far, AATA has cloned 70 “champion” trees (the largest tree of a given species).

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Aliya Barnwell
Aliya Barnwell
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Aliya Tyus-Barnwell is a writer, cyclist and gamer with an interest in technology. Also a fantasy fan, she's had fiction…
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more
4 simple pieces of tech that helped me run my first marathon
Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar displaying pace information.

The fitness world is littered with opportunities to buy tech aimed at enhancing your physical performance. No matter your sport of choice or personal goals, there's a deep rabbit hole you can go down. It'll cost plenty of money, but the gains can be marginal -- and can honestly just be a distraction from what you should actually be focused on. Running is certainly susceptible to this.

A few months ago, I ran my first-ever marathon. It was an incredible accomplishment I had no idea I'd ever be able to reach, and it's now going to be the first of many I run in my lifetime. And despite my deep-rooted history in tech, and the endless opportunities for being baited into gearing myself up with every last product to help me get through the marathon, I went with a rather simple approach.

Read more