Apple’s new Mac Mini and Mac Studio Are All About Local AI - DTNS 5339

[music] >> This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, August 25th, 2026. [music] We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context on all of it, and help each other understand. >> Oh, today Dr. Nikki is going to explain why making female clones of male mice is important for you. >> Me. >> Don't say it's not. >> Them. >> The Yeah. Uh also, uh the big story is Apple has new Mac Minis and Mac Studios that are perfect if you want to run a local AI. >> Oh boy, the story of 2026, localized AI. >> I'm Jason Howell. I'm Tom Merritt. >> Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. Yes, Apple has announced new versions of the Mac Mini and Mac Studio and some new chips. We're going to talk about all of this. Um but really it seems like the big story here is that what Apple's announcing is very much addressing developers and people who might want to run open-weight AI models locally on their machine, right? The Mac Mini uh now runs on M6 or M5 Pro. Apple's claiming [snorts] up to four times faster AI inference, twice the graphics performance from previous models as well. The M6 is uh by the way Apple's first 2-nanometer uh Mac chip. Has a 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU, up to 32 gigs of unified memory. 32, we'll talk about that. Uh 160 gigs of memory bandwidth, and starts at $899. Then you got the M5 Pro uh model starting at $1699. Both of them, by the way, $100 more than the M4 model equivalents uh that came before them. Then you got the Mac Studio, the beefier, bulkier one. It's been at the gym, let me tell you. Uh gets M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, 4.3 times faster inferencing. The M5 Max starts at $2499. The M5 Ultra starts at 54.99, so 55 5500 dollars, both an increase of a couple of 100 dollars from before. We've got the chips which we can talk about for sure, but why don't we just start with the machines themselves and maybe the maybe maybe what this seems to be which is Apple kind of creating hardware that could potentially and probably will appeal appeal to people who are looking at this moment in AI and realizing, "Hey, I don't want to be in the cloud for everything. I want to do this all locally." Here's some machines that are built kind of with that in mind, it seems. >> Yeah, yeah. You can daisy chain Macs to run inference on LLMs. And so this is saying, "Hey, wouldn't you like to have more daisy chain?" >> [laughter] >> More daisy in your chain, I guess, I don't know. We we can talk a little more about why that is when we talk about the chips. But a lot of it is made possible by macOS 26.2, which enabled some low latency communication between Thunderbolt 5 hosts. And so that continues here and the increased chip power means that you can do more of that. It's also a great the Mac mini itself is also a great machine for people who are not at all interested in inferencing locally. >> For sure. >> And I think a lot of people have been waiting for this. The the conventional wisdom is pretty much similar to every other release, which is if you've got an M4 Mac mini, you probably don't need to upgrade. You got an M2 or an M3 Mac mini, now you might want to look into it, even though you are going to pay more. $100 more, maybe not as bad as a lot of people thought. Apple's been pretty good at holding the line on prices. So the fact that they had to raise it at all, I think is telling. But But yeah, I think if you're on an M2 Mac mini and it's starting to chug, this is a great option for you. If you're on an M4 and you don't need extra power for some kind of supercharged thing, then you probably don't need to upgrade to this. And the Mac Studio, I don't know. It's probably the same same diagnosis I would give for that. But also the Mac Studio to me is for people who are silly. >> [laughter] >> You know, I don't mean like I don't mean silly like, you know, you're not a serious person, but like, yes, I'm not concerned about whether I should upgrade or not. I just want the the maximum thing. >> Biggest most obvious thing. Yeah, I mean I'm running a Mac Studio right now to do this. So call me silly, Tom. >> You're a silly person. No, I just mean like who needs I guess I shouldn't say you're silly. I should say you need silly power, right? To do the things that you're doing. Yeah. >> Right. And you might not even need that power. Some people just want it want to know that they have it. >> They they feel yes, exactly. They feel better knowing that they have it even if they don't use it. You know, both of those machines do have Apple's N1 chip. So they support Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6. Apple's claiming that the storage is up to twice as fast as 15 gig gigabits per second. Mac Mini ships with 2.5 gigabit Ethernet as standard. There is an option to upgrade to 10 gigabit. And pre-orders for both of those are starting today. You're going to get them shipped sometime around September 22nd with Mac OS 27 Golden Gate. Though the 512 gig memory configuration for the studio will not ship until late October. But you know, if you got your itchy trigger finger, you know, I've got 2023 Mac Studio. Should I should I No, I probably will not. >> Amos, our our producer was was looking into it because he also likes silly power. And he was like, you can't even order the the one with the 512 gigabyte. Yeah. >> Interesting. Well, as for the chips themselves and I I've kind of you know, I've already mentioned a few of the details like the fact that the M6 is Apple's first 2 nanometer chip. You got 12 core CPU and GPU, 32 gigs, like we said, of unified memory, which to me, 32 seems a bit low as like a cap, but maybe maybe it's not when you're talking about, you know, these these power-hungry local models and everything, but there you are. 160 gigs per second of bandwidth. Apple claims fastest single-threaded performance, nearly a 30% increase in peak GPU compute for inferencing. Mark Gurman, by the way, from Bloomberg also reports that this is the only M6 Apple plans to release. Its plan is to go straight to the M7 for pros and maxes next year. And then the M5 Ultra, it is a quad die 3 nanometer chip, Ultra Fusion. It basically fuses two dual die M5 Max chips, so you got four M5 chips. Silly power with inner die >> [laughter] >> bandwidth of 4.4 terabits per second, and up to a 36 core CPU and 80 core GPU. Lots of numbers thrown out, but you can max out, like you said, that 512 gigs of unified memory at the max, up to 1.2 terabytes Is it terabytes or terabits? >> Terabytes per second, yeah. >> Terabytes per second in terms of the unified memory bandwidth, and it's the most powerful chip in Apple Silicon, at least at the moment. >> Yeah, cuz this is not bandwidth like like you have in your internet. This is bandwidth in the processor. This is why you can have four chips and they don't act like four chips. They're they're built so that the the communication between them is so fast that they're practically one chip. And that's why 32 gigabytes of RAM unified memory, because it's so close to the die and has 160 gigabyte per second bandwidth, for a Mac mini, is probably fine. Even though it sounds low when you're thinking of [snorts] of of typical RAM, it works in practice faster. That's been true the the Apple silicon since they first introduced it. But hey, when you're talking about the M5 Ultra, why would you limit yourself? Go for 512 GB unified memory at 1.2 terabytes per second. Yeah, you will never fill that up. Um >> That sounds like a challenge, Tom. >> [laughter] >> Yeah, if you can afford the if you have the means, I highly recommend it. [laughter] These especially the M5 Ultra chip, and I think this is going to be confusing for some people like well M6 that six is higher than five, isn't that one better? It's not a pro, it's not a max, it's not an ultra, so no, it's not. And the M7s like you said are coming, so this this M6 will always just be kind of you know, a consumer level chip. But that M5 Ultra man, it is interesting to see Apple really emphasize on device intelligence. It's something that Apple's research and foundational research has been very good at even though they don't have a great reputation for for LLMs in general. They are very good at on device and efficiency and bringing out power and they're pointing out even in their own releases that you know, you can get an open weight model and run it on this device. Open weight models are the new hotness. Everyone's talking about getting Qwen or Kimmy or something like that and running it on a local machine. So I don't know if it's by design or desperation, but Apple seems really well positioned to take advantage of that trend and say we are the favored machine already. We just made that favored machine better. >> Yeah, I completely agree. It's a good position. It's a good moment for Apple to kind of double down on on this. You know, it wasn't that long ago that Open Claw was you know, which is not an open weight model necessarily, but the OpenClaw thing happened. Suddenly Apple found itself in a position where it's Mac minis were being scooped up left, right, and center because they were being embraced by the AI market as the machine to do this sort of thing on. And this feels like, you know, it's it's kind of in a similar universe, which is Apple saying, "Hey, our hardware is good for all of this everything that's happening in AI right now." And especially this moment where like like I said earlier, open open models appears to be the AI story of the year. I thought it was more agents at the beginning of the year, but it really is turning out to be that the trend is away from cloud more to on-device. You're going to pay more for those machines when you do that up front, but you're going to save on all the cloud cost if you can make it all localized like this, and Apple's in a great position to benefit, you know, along with like Nvidia, let's say. >> Yeah. And I don't think [clears throat] that means bad news for the Anthropic's and OpenAIs of the world because enterprises still need the kind of power that they can provide. And that's where the big money comes from. And so when people criticize Apple for not being in the same league as OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, I tend to wonder and they may be right. They may be absolutely right. There's some very smart people saying that, so I wouldn't want to, you know, dismiss it. But I wonder if it doesn't end up being like cloud computing where Apple just couldn't quite run iCloud themselves at a in a way that worked well. And there was some criticism of that. Like Apple, you need to be able to do cloud. And it turned out, no, they don't. They can just use AWS. They can use Google Cloud and focus on the things they do well. And that may be how this plays out, which is Apple's really good at the devices and making AI run on on including their own models or the one you want to bring and then if you want cloud LLMs, you can pay for that just like you pay for cloud storage. >> Mhm. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Yep. >> And and that that's kind of what they're doing by having a modified version of Gemini be Apple intelligence. It's like iCloud really sitting on an AWS server somewhere, right? It's even though it's called iCloud. >> So true. >> Uh well, folks, uh there's a lot of talk going about this uh among star patrons. Uh so uh if you would like to become a patron, uh it's very easy. Just head to patreon.com/dtns. We always like to thank a few of our patrons. There's more than we could ever thank in any individual episode. Uh but we always talk thank our top patrons and a few others. Uh this time big thanks to Reagan, Jeffrey Zilks, Adam L, and Philip Less. >> So much more we need to know today, so let's get to the briefs. >> Uber is testing a new feature aimed at authorized parents and guardians. >> [laughter] >> Uh I I don't think you have to do like passkey or or two-factor authentication that you are the parent or guardian, but we just mean like if someone's legitimately your parent or guardian and they've put you on their plan with Uber, they could take advantage of this. Uh it lets them access a live stream of their teenage child's ride through the driver's smartphone selfie camera. So imagine that camera popped up on the dash. Uh the drivers in the teen program and we'll we'll get to that in a second uh are encouraged to turn this on and then point that camera so that that parent can see in the back seat. Now, the driver has to opt in for this feature in order for it to work. Uh so if you do call a ride and it's not there, could be because of that. But when they do activate it, both the teen and the driver will be notified that, "Hey, the parent or the guardian is viewing this right now." Uh and it only works during during You can't look at the video after the ride ends. The feature is built on Uber teen accounts. Uber launched that back in 2023. So, if you have a child between 13 and 17, you can put them in this program, and then you get matched with drivers that are highly rated specifically for taking your children around. Uh you get real-time map tracking, so you know where your child's going. Uh mandatory PIN verification to make sure that your child is in the right car, uh and an option to record trip audio. And now this new feature, uh which is the option to look at live video. This is starting as a test in nine markets: Atlanta, Phoenix, Orlando, San Antonio, Cleveland, El Paso, Raleigh-Durham, Portland, and Rhode Island. Those are all in the United States. Uh and the program is set to expand US-wide over the coming weeks. Jason, a parent with teens, how how you thinking about this? Something you you you would uh trust or use? >> Well, it's funny. My daughter, who is 16, uh going on 20 at this point. Um she was here earlier making her breakfast when I was reading through this, and I asked her about it, and she just gave me a few eye rolls. And she was like, "This is not going to stop anything. Do do do." You know, in typical teen fashion. Um but uh you know, as a parent, I mean, I've we've I've you know, my wife and I have certainly been in the position where we're like, I think when maybe our older daughter was a little younger, where we're like, "Oh, well, maybe she can just take an Uber." And then we kind of think about, "Okay, well, what does that entail? What does that mean? How comfortable do we feel in everything?" Do I feel like I need a live video stream in the car of my daughter when she's riding in an Uber? I don't necessarily feel like I absolutely need that, but I also realize that parents, you know, every parent is different as far as what makes them feel comfortable. What is the the feature set that enables them to be like, "Okay, I'm okay with you riding in an Uber now, because if I wanted to, I could do that thing. So, you know, and also I think what I what I thought when I read through this is it's interesting {slash} fascinating to me to think about how products like this are developed. Like you're in an Uber, they're already using their phone for navigation, it's already mounted on the dash, and someone made that connection of like, "Well, I mean it's in the perfect position to like record and stream video. Why not just activate that as a feature?" I think I think it's a smart move. It'll make [snorts] some parents very happy. >> And putting it in the driver's control means that the driver can decide if they want to do it or not. And the drivers who do decide to do it will be more highly rated in that teen program, right? And that teen program is meant to to kind of vet drivers that are good with teens. So, if you're like, "Yeah, I don't want to be doing that." That's okay, you don't have to. You could be taking other fares. Um I do wonder if the parents that send their lunches the children forgot by Uber to classes will be able to use this to look at the lunch. >> [laughter] >> Which is something my niece's school had to tell parents you can't do this anymore. We're not >> [laughter] >> Oh, that's that's funny. But also what a lonesome lunch it is sitting on the chair with no [laughter] one next to it. >> Google is rolling out a new motion assist feature to Pixel devices running Android 17. This is a feature that displays these motion cues over the top of your apps and the system UI when it detects that you're in a moving vehicle and moving. So, it's it's essentially it's intended to reduce motion sickness for riders in those vehicles while they use their phone. Users can find and activate the setting inside of Google Play settings. You find your profile and then all services. I went looking, I could not find it just for the record. >> So, you don't have it yet. Okay. >> No, I don't have it yet. I I'll activate it cuz I've certainly been in that position where and I know that Apple introduced vehicle motion cues in iOS 18 back in 2024. So, I've seen them, you know, I've seen my daughter actually use it on her iPhone. And then Oppo and Vivo also have similar features. But this is basically it coming to Pixel devices. And I don't know if it's going to expand beyond Pixel devices to other devices inside of Android. But you know, I wouldn't be surprised if it's stuck on Pixel for a while. >> That That was a little unclear to me, too, from what I was reading. But the way Android Authority wrote it, it was like it's coming to Android 17 Pixels first, which is kind of typical for stuff. So, I think the intention is that it will roll out to others. But man, you know what? I have a lot of friends and family who get motion sick in a car. This kind of thing can be a lifesaver in in the ability not only to reduce motion sickness, but to allow them to do things in the car that they otherwise just can't do. You know? >> Yeah, that's true. That's true. It's not just about watching a YouTube video. Although for my daughter, it probably is. But she is, you know, she My younger daughter is the right person for this. She definitely gets motion sick in a car if she's looking at a screen, particularly on like more windy roads and everything like that. She has used the feature on iOS and it works for her. So, this is just one of those random weird things that someone discovered that actually does the trick for a lot of people. So, I'm happy to see it coming to Android officially. >> Yeah, me, too. A little public service message here. OpenAI has banned several ChatGPT accounts that it says were based in Russia and then using VPNs to hide the fact. OpenAI does not allow access to its models from accounts in Russia. So, they had the right to ban them once they discovered that anyway. But OpenAI found them cuz they were investigating generated social media posts. Apparently, OpenAI goes around and looks to see if it can find evidence of people misusing its service. And they discovered a broad influencer operation. The operators of the accounts were using prompts to generate comments. So, they would use ChatGPT to generate a comment that sounded human and then put them on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook, and LinkedIn, as well as of course instructing ChatGPT to hide any indication that these were made by Russians. Many of the comments referred to a website called the International Burke Institute, which according to OpenAI contained copied and misattributed academic work, a sovereignty index that cast Russia in a favorable light, and efforts to disguise the operators' Russian origins. OpenAI believes the campaign had limited impact in actually affecting people's opinions, but said that the significance of the operation lies less in the audience it reached and more in the infrastructure it had built. The fact that there are sophisticated operations that will make a comment that doesn't immediately look like a bot, and then lead you to a website that doesn't immediately look fake and has enough true things in it that you're like, "Oh, this looks legit." Is something that everyone should be aware is happening, not just from actors in Russia, but from elsewhere as well. >> Yeah, it's it's kind of subtle, right? It's it's a subtle, sneaky way to kind of slowly trickle in influence and and potential propaganda and stuff like that to kind of feed into these systems not in an outright like, "Here's Here's a wall of misinformation and if you read it then you fell for our trick." But just kind of slowly making its way potentially into the results and the the output and kind of eventually kind of slowly steering that in different directions. >> Yeah, there's two two things to to really remember. One is it won't be obvious that the comment is made by propaganda. They're very good at hiding it. It could be about your favorite music group or your favorite TV show, right? It's not going to lead with like, "Russia is great." Great. [laughter] The second thing is you may not be seeing the original comment. Those comments often are used to get real people to then parrot them. Go, yeah, that's a good point. I'm going to say it over here. So, you may be seeing it from somebody you're like, yeah, but I know that's a real person, but doesn't mean what they're saying originated with a real person. So, this is all all stuff to keep in mind, especially when you read that post that makes you happy or sad, makes you angry or or or feel joy. Uh you got an extreme emotion from a comment, uh but you're ra- raise shields cuz cuz it might not be from a real person. >> Good point. >> Uh however, that's one of the reasons I spend more of my time in our Discord talking to people I know are absolutely real people uh because we we vet that pretty well. Uh there's a great conversation in there going on about the Apple processors and whether they amount of RAM makes sense, did they bin one of the processors in the M5 Ultra and if so, why? Uh to good smart people doing the work of mathematics to figure all this out. That's in our Discord. Uh if you want to join our Discord conversation, you can link your Patreon account to do so. patreon.com/dtns. >> All right, we got a bunch of headlines to get to and uh you know, get to making you look even smarter than you already are, but which by the way, you are very smart. >> Yeah, we can't make you better looking cuz look at you, but we can try [laughter] to make you a little smarter. Uh the headline you'll see reads US data centers tripled their water footprint in 10 years. The report it's referring to comes from the US Congressional Research Service estimating that water use from 2014 to 2024 did triple. The key fact though is that direct water use. So, the amount used by the data center for cooling makes up 2% of that total, probably mostly from data centers built with older evaporative cooling systems, while more than 80% of the water use comes from the generation of the electricity used to power the data center. So, that's just important to remember if cuz if you try to go after the data center cooling, you're not going to reduce the water use. You need to look at how the electricity being provided to the data center is using water. Uh just important to know when you're evaluating new construction projects. >> Very, very. OpenAI [snorts] said at the Hot Chips conference that its new Jalapeno inference chip actually beat Nvidia's GB200 on response speed and power in its own benchmarks anyways. It's inference only. It can't train models. It hasn't been tested against Nvidia's newer Vera Rubin chips yet. So, keep that in mind as well. But, Jalapeno is coming. >> Yeah, power efficiency. Do you think you have to name your chip after a hot pepper to be at the Hot Chips conference? Like, is there a scotch bonnet >> not. >> [laughter] >> Uh Nvidia introduced the Jetson Orin Nano 2 computer, which doubles the inference performance from the previous model for edge robotics. We're talking about physical AI, robots, delivery drones, advanced vision systems. Uh it hits 78 trillion operations a second with 40% less power use and can run local models like Cosmos and Gemma. The module and dev kit are set to ship in the first half of 2027. Just robots, man. Robots are the the next hotness. >> Fitbit founders James Park and Eric Friedman launched Liefu Link and e-band that tracks vitals, sends help alerts with your location. It's built basically for caregivers and independent older adults. Uh it'll set you back $300 with a $50 discount with pre-order. Ships early 2027. >> Yeah, and kind of cool-looking. I can't decide if I like it or not, actually, but it's interesting-looking. Uh WhatsApp is bulking up two-step verification, letting you set a full alphanumeric password instead of just a six-digit PIN and adding support for multiple passkeys so that you can have a passkey on multiple devices, which is important. >> Okay. >> Yes. Perplexity teamed up with Nvidia on portable computer. This is an AI agent that runs locally on your own hardware. See our earlier conversation on local and open like a DGX Spark or a Linux PC with RTX GPUs with zero per token cost. It's live now for paid subscribers on Linux with Windows support coming in September. >> Yeah, I don't know if I'd do this on a Chromebook, but still pretty cool. Apple is backing off its plan to move hide my email onto the private.icloud.com domain after concerns that then websites would just block private.icloud.com and and with without having to block real iCloud users. Sign in with Apple address will make the move. That's coming off of private relay.appleid.com to an icloud.com domain later this year. >> 9to5 reports the New York Times is testing AI-generated summaries on a search page served to a small number of readers. No editorial review on that. Isn't it ironic, don't you think? >> What model are they using, too? Is it one of the ones they're suing? I'm curious about that as well. Very curious. >> Waymo is expanding to Bavaria, Munich to be specific. First stop in Europe for Waymo with mapping and manual test driving of their electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicle starting soon and then commercial service targeted to start late next year. We've already had tests in Munich for Wave, Baidu, and Momenta or at least in other parts of Germany. Uber planning to test their cars from auto brands in Munich as well. And Germany's own Volkswagen MOIA is putting autonomous shuttles on the streets in Hamburg. >> Hmm. In Australia, we've got the Aria charts banning fully AI-generated music starting this Friday. Um Though they are allowing through AI use in you know, used in a supporting role, that's still deemed okay. This follows an AI cover song of Like a Prayer that apparently hit number four on the charts in July without Madonna's explicit permission. >> Has to be substantially human made, does not have to be Madonna approved though. >> Mhm, okay. >> That's not in the rules. ASUS is marking its Republic of Gamers division's 20th anniversary by opening pre-orders for an updated Xbox Ally, the ROG Xbox Ally X 20. It is a $1300 handheld with a bigger screen, 7.4 inch OLED screen, nice new anniversary look, same AMD chip as before. Pre-orders are open right now. You can get it through ASUS or Best Buy and then sales start October 15th. >> Mhm, today is the day that Linux turns 35. As the anniversary of Linus Torvalds, Linus Torvalds, sorry. Usenet post announcing a just a hobby operating system that wouldn't be big and professional like new. He wanted to call it Is it Fru or Freaks? I'm not really Freaks. Freaks, but a server admin renamed the folder Linux before he could stop it. >> Yeah, it's also GNU. >> GNU, GNU. >> Yeah, you got to say the G. Yeah. >> GNU. >> 35, so he can run for president. That's cool. >> Dutch company Vitestro received the first US FDA approval for a standalone robotic device that can draw blood for blood tests. The Aletta can read a patient's arm, choose a vein, draw blood in 1 minute and 49 seconds. That's according to an actual clinical trial. This is just not just an estimate. Typical human phlebotomist, which is what the person who takes your blood is called, takes approximately 5 minutes to do this. You still need the human, but you can triple the number of blood draws that human can supervise cuz they can supervise up to three devices at once and the human still confirms the proper tube order, the volume, the patient care. I act I asked Dr. Jerry Tolbert about this and he was super excited. He's going to get back to me with more details. >> Super interesting. All right. Well, those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little bit deeper. >> Yes, recently researchers used gene editing technology to create female clones of male mice. Why? Dr. Nikki explains. Dr. Nikki, thanks for joining us. >> Happy to be here or is it my clone? >> Oh, is it Dr. Nikki with one K or six? >> Yeah, the second the second K is my evil clone. That's how you [laughter] know. >> So, get us up to speed. Where are we on cloning? Cuz I think everybody thinks about Dolly the sheep and that's kind of the extent of it for most people. >> I certainly do. Named after Dolly Parton, by the way. I don't >> Oh, yeah. >> So, we cloned Dolly the sheep about 30 years ago and since then cloning has progressed quite a bit. And also, if you ever want to visit her, I found out that she is stuffed in a museum in Scotland and I will go there one day. >> Stuffed as in like had a lot of haggis or Tex- Okay, Texan. >> Someone must have eaten cloned haggis. Okay, we'll get to that later. >> [laughter] >> Anyway, closing cloning has, you know, expanded since 1996 and you can use it for lots of different things. You can now clone pets or at a more I don't know, I think more or less ethical but similarly ethical way, you can also clone endangered species. This has been done for the black-footed ferret in the US or the Przewalski's horse. But keep in mind that this type of cloning requires egg cells from a donor animal and also a surrogate animal to carry the embryo. So, there's like it's not all in a lab and there's some like ethics limitations on that. And that's also affecting some other stories we've talked about about cloning on DTNS, which comes from our friends at not friends at Colossal Biosciences. Um >> We haven't met. >> No, right. We don't know them. I just talk about them. >> [laughter] >> Um they make big claims about cloning extinct animals like the mammoth, and that's where I mentioned that surrogate animals might be a problem because you need like a surrogate elephant. Um or they've talked about doing the dodo, but so far they've really only produced gene-edited wolves. Um so we can clone stuff pretty decently. Um and that's where we're at. >> And now we can change the sex of the clone. Is that that that's what's going on with the mouse story here? >> Yeah, and so I don't know if on the surface this seems like not a big deal, but I feel like it's a huge deal. So I will I will bring you up to speed. So for the first time uh recently researchers used a CRISPR-based genetic editing tool. Um they call it Y-cut. And basically they take a male mouse embryo and remove the Y chromosome so that it is a female mouse embryo. Uh I will point out that this is based on a preprint that has not yet been peer-reviewed, so take it as >> Ah, yeah. Okay, proper proper skepticism. Proper skepticism on cloning in general, as we mentioned earlier. Uh but yeah, this one this one needs to be peer-reviewed, so we'll keep an ear out for that. Um but so this isn't taking an existing animal and and and editing the genes to change its uh gender. It's changing it in utero, basically, or in vitro, I >> Yeah, and I will say sex specifically cuz mouse don't have gender, and I correct that a lot, and people really so I'm going to say it on the show. >> No, I absolutely used the wrong word there. Um so how did they achieve this? Give us walk us through it. >> Yeah, so this research team, which is based out of Japan, successfully So they have a kind of male mouse donor cell, and they they able to produce both a male clone and a female clone from the same donor. This has never been done before, so it's actually a pretty huge deal. Um the way they do this is, let's say in the female mouse first that has two X chromosomes, that's how it becomes a female mouse, they just removed one of the two X chromosomes and it was still viable. So in the they took a donor female mouse, it gave a clone which is a donor female embryo, and in that clone they edited it at it was when it was at the embryo stage and removed this X chromosome and it was still viable. So you have basically a mouse with only one X chromosome. And we know from from the past that this is something that is viable, it happens sometimes through mutation. And so they took this logic and brought it to the male embryo where they have the male donor, makes a clone that's a male embryo. I love that this is just like standard, like yeah, you just clone the mouse, don't worry about that part. >> Yeah, we do that all the time. >> Whatever. And then they removed the Y chromosome, so it also has a single X and it comes out as female. So and then even crazier, I feel like that's already crazy. >> already crazy. You're going to do be crazier? >> So interesting. Crazier than that, the females that are produced are fertile and you can cross them to have viable offspring. >> Huh. >> So this I'm not a geneticist, but I feel like this is quite a big breakthrough and it basically makes it to a certain extent that you don't do not need a male and a female for reproduction. >> Wow. Okay, so that I already have some ideas of how that could prove useful. What what are people talking about using this for? Granted preprint, still waiting for peer review, but assuming this all pans out. >> Yeah, I actually really like how the authors framed this. They're specific specifically framing this as a way to increase outcomes when cloning critically endangered species and specifically because a lot of those will have a really limited genetic resources. So you you may have a frozen sample from I don't know, let's say the the black-footed ferret and you you only have so much material that you can use to clone. And an example they give is that the San Diego Zoo has a {quote} {unquote} frozen zoo, a vault where they have thousands of frozen samples from endangered animals and they've just been waiting for technology to get better to try and help save them. So, this this technology also has been tested on cryopreserved embryos and still works. Okay. So, this might be a really great application for that. Um still in that case genetic diversity might remain a problem, right? Like you need usually about 50 individuals to have a species without it going extinct from like inbreeding. That can be stretched with cloning, but that's a problem for later. This is cool enough without worrying about that. >> Okay. So, that that alone is really interesting research that that could prove incredibly helpful. I know there've been lots of attempts beyond just colossal biosciences to clone extinct species. In fact, I believe MIT Technology Review in one of the articles I was reading said there was maybe an ibex had been had been cloned and then was not viable, but it lived long enough. So, technically the species went extinct twice. >> You know, it's so sad. >> That's very sad. >> And it's close to home too because they're from where I grew up in the Pyrenees. And >> Oh, really? Oh, wow. Yeah. So, I know someone and probably several someones are like, "Okay, but what about us? Does this Is this going to get us closer to being able to clone me?" >> So, cloning humans is probably technically possible. However, it's illegal. >> Ah, uh-huh. >> Everywhere, like everyone's agreed we're not going to do this because of the ethical reasons. Has it been done in secret in a lab? I I would say probably not just because the type of lab like people know like I don't know. There's a type of lab that can clone stuff. People know who they are and scientists are not good at keeping secrets. So I feel like we would know. >> Okay. >> I think we have the technology to do it. It's just incredibly unethical. >> Got it. >> I >> Well, I will keep a we'll keep an eye out to see if this preprint makes it into a journal and try to let people know if we see that. But Dr. Nikki, thank you so much for helping us understand this one. If people want more of your perspective on things, where might they go these days? >> Yeah, so for my or my evil clones perspective, you can find me at nicoleackermans.com, same handle on Blue Sky. And if you want to hear other random thoughts I have about science, check out my and Juan Twaydo's new show Technical Tea, which is in the DTNS family of podcasts. We talk about tech, we talk about science, and we talk about everything in between. It's at technicaltea.show. >> Fantastic. Thanks, Dr. Nikki. >> Bye. >> I wish we could clone Dr. Nikki. >> Yeah, but that would be not very ethical, Tom. >> Not yet. Not yet. >> So you're saying there's a chance? >> Someday. >> [laughter] >> There we go. All right, we end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. And today Martin has a question about the new Pixel phone. >> Yes. Here's Here's his question, Jason. Martin wants to know the highlight on the Pixel 11 phones. You know, the the the LED strip. Is that any different from the notification LEDs on early Android phones like the Nexus One or the Nexus 4? >> Bingo. >> [laughter] >> I mean it I mean is is it different? Yes, it's multi-color. It's a different design. I think the function is mostly the same. You know, it's it's it's a notification light. That's what I've been saying since this whole all the rumors started cropping up. It's like, "Oh, okay. So it's it's a notification light." Not to mention like because it replaces the flash, Um, are now articles that are that are basically confirming that like the quality of the flash, you know, if you use it for a flashlight and everything is actually less than it used to be because of its new functionality and everything. So, I can tell you after a couple of weeks of using this phone, highlight is not even on my radar. It's hardly even a blip. It's It's really overblown. Um, it's just one of those features that in my view is um far oversold uh compared >> Um, among the Pixel 11 features, you wouldn't say it's one of the highlights. >> I would definitely not say that highlight is the highlight. >> [laughter] >> Uh, well, folks, if you have a better pun than that, please send it to us feedback@dailynewsshow.com. >> And thanks to Martin for contributing today's show. Also, Dr. Nikki for contributing. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron at patreon.com/dtns. We'll see you tomorrow. >> The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. >> Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. >> [laughter]