We've got lots of ice buried under the Martian equator, an AI that's good at

solving high school geometry challenges, and a Japanese moonlander called Slim, all in the Science Friday News Roundup.

It's Friday January 19th, also known officially as Science Friday. I'm Cyfry producer Kathleen Davis.

Lots of stories this week, but first up, a research team in China reported that it has used a new technique to

successfully clone a recess monkey that clone named Retro has now lived for

over two years and reached maturity. This is the first time that a recess monkey has

been successfully cloned. The species is used widely in medical research, making the advance

potentially useful for medical trials.

Tim Revel of new scientist joins Ira to talk about the work and its implications.

Welcome back, Tim.

Thanks for having me.

Nice to have you. Okay, tell us about this clone monkey. What's going on here?

Yeah, so there have been many attempts to clone recess monkeys over the years, but normally they result in very early deaths,

and retro appears to be the first clone recess monkey that is

completely healthy he was actually born in July 2020 and but we're just

hearing about him now so he's actually more than three and the thing with this clone is that

it's slightly different cloning to the normal type of cloning you'd think of in terms of

like Dolly the sheep from the 1990s and that's that rather than using adult cells, fetal cells were the key thing at the beginning.

So that means you couldn't use this technique to just take some cells from you and create a second IRA.

Instead, you would have that to begin with?

Instead you would have had to imagine that right at the beginning of your life.

And what did that solve?

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