A skilled digital artist is using virtual reality to bring Scotland’s lost built heritage back to life with a series of interactive videos showing urban environments as they looked more than a century ago.

Over the past couple of years, Ian Young, from Paisley, has spent untold numbers of hours recreating fully-detailed bygone 3D views of his hometown Paisley and, more recently, Glasgow.

In Mr Young’s latest published effort, a 360 degree view of Glasgow’s St Enoch Square of the year 1900, the viewer is treated to a chance to be immersed (沉浸) in the square’s many lost public buildings.

Most notable perhaps is the multi-levelled building of the St Enoch Railway Station Hotel. Constructed in 1875, the grand hotel was taken down a little over a century later to eventually make way for the St Enoch shopping centre, which remains a pity among those who can recall it.

Occupying the centre of the 3D view, the St Enoch subway station, which still exists today, serves as a helpful reference point within the much-changed urban environment.

To perfect his architectural recreations, which can take weeks and even months to create, Mr Young has also gone to the bother of recreating early Glasgow single-decker tramcars (单层电车), further adding to the sense of realism. In the future, he plans to include horses and carts and passersby dressed in the clothes of the time.

“St Enoch Square is an enclosed area, perfect for a 360 degree movie,” explains Mr Young. “I never knew there had been a hotel there and that really inspired me, as I realised a lot of others wouldn’t know about it either.”

With a degree in computer animation and experience working as a full-time architectural modeller in Australia, Mr Young says his ultimate dream is to work with National Museums of Scotland and use his creations to help educate the masses, an attempt which has been denied by the official. “I don’t understand.” added Mr Young. “It’s simply about recreating streets, buildings that are now long gone. If the technology’s there, then why aren’t we using it?”

From talking robots to driverless vehicles, technology has become so advanced that the previously impossible seems to occur on a daily basis. And yet-we still have no cure for the common cold.

Why can't we stop the common cold? According to Peter Barlow, a scientist at Edinburgh Napier University, the main challenge lies in the many different types of cold viruses that belong to the rhinoviruses(鼻病毒). There are at least 160 types.They mutate(突变) so easily that they quickly become resistant to drugs, or learn to hide from our immune systems. In other words, a single cure isn't likely to work on every type of cold.

However, researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco, have found a possible answer. They discovered a protein(蛋白质) that the viruses need. All the viruses were unable to replicate(复制) inside cells without a gene that produces a specific protein called SETD3.

To identify the gene which produces the specific protein, researchers used a gene-editing technique to test all genes in the human genome (基因组). Namely, they randomly disabled a single gene in each of the cells, so that the cells lacked one or another of every gene in our genome. These genetically modified cells were then exposed to the rhinoviruses, which cause the common cold. The team then looked at which gene was missing in cells that continued to grow. As it turned out, the one that stood out was SETD3, which makes a protein of the same name.

Carette said the plan is to find a drug which can temporarily disable the protein, instead of producing genetically modified humans. “We have identified a fantastic target that all rhinoviruses require and depend on. Take that away and the virus really has no chance,” said Carette.

When Barbra Streisand said that she'd had her dog cloned for $50,000, many people learned for the first time that copying pets and other animals was a real business.

The story that gave people cause for concern, though, came out a few days later. It was about Monni Must, a Michigan photographer who paid to have Billy Bean cloned, a Labrador that had belonged to her oldest daughter, Miya. Miya died 10 years earlier. To Must, cloning the elderly dog was a way to keep her daughter's memory alive.

Alarm bells went off in my head. Must wasn't just cloning a pet. She was trying to preserve a lost child. It seemed awfully close to a real human cloning scenario, one in which a heartbroken parent tries to replace a son or daughter who dies early.

I shot a question at Jose Cibelli, an animal cloning scientist at Michigan State University: is it time to worry about human cloning again? Cibelli quickly emailed back: “Yes.”

I met Cibelli 15 years ago, when I was among a group of journalists covering cloning nonstop. Back then, it seemed possible that someone might try to copy a human being at any moment. There was an Italian doctor named Antinori who said he was trying.

But human cloning never happened. The reason is clear. In many animals, only one in 100 cloned embryos ever leads to a live birth. Of those that are born, a few suffer from abnormalities (畸形) and quickly die. Creating a human clone isn't only a question of technology. You'd also need a reason to do it, experts willing to help, and someone to fund it all.

I finally asked Must if she would have cloned Miya if she'd had the chance? She said it's not a question she has an answer to. “When you have a child who dies, you are not in a place to make a rational (理智的) decision,” she says.