Copy, Paste, Clone: What it Takes to Bring Back the Past

In 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, proving that a fully differentiated cell could be reprogrammed back to an embryonic state. But nearly three decades later, cloning a mammal is still anything but routine. "Every successful clone is hand-crafted one embryo at a time by a highly trained embryologist," explains Dr. Vilson Bordignon, an associate professor in the Department of Animal Science at McGill University who produced the first clone transgenic pigs in Canada. This episode of Curiosity Weekly explores the science of clones alongside two other topics: a scientific explanation for the eerie feeling people report in old houses, and a smarter way to kill termites using their own sense of smell.

The Unsettling Science of Infrasound

Researchers have been working for years to find scientific explanations for supernatural phenomena, and a recent study offers a potential explanation for that uneasy sensation some people feel in old houses. The culprit is not spirits but sound waves—specifically, something called infrasound. Infrasound is an ultra-low frequency vibration too low for human ears to hear. It occurs naturally through thunder or volcanic eruptions, but it can also come from human-made sources like heavy machinery, airplanes, and old buildings.