As the end of the year is approaching, we can look back at a great number of appearances in the media for CPG during 2023. Several publications gained a lot of attention, and CPG researchers were featured both in swedish and international press/TV. Already at the very start of the year, a study covering human genetics in Scandinavia was published in Cell, with results that were brought up for instance by Reuters and Swedish Radio. Just before summer, another paper made the headlines, this time with the first ancient RNA ever recovered from an extinct species. The species in question was the Tasmanian tiger, that went extinct in the 1930’s. Using a preserved skin from the Swedish Museum of Natural History, researchers at CPG were able to retrieve RNA, a breakthrough which was published in Genome Research and reported on by CNN among others. Several new projects were also initiated during 2023. One of them, funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, will explore the consequences of the first encounters between modern humans and megafauna in the northern hemisphere. The project will be multidisciplinary and involve four of CPG’s research groups. Finally, as an example of public outreach, the research at CPG and palaeogenetics in general was presented and explained at a filmed lecture for Utbildningsradion (swedish TV), aimed at the general public in swedish.
