The Dilemma: Your kid and the clone he just created emerge from the basement “lab” looking exactly the same, and now you’re not sure which one to ship off to military school and which one to put up for adoption.

People You Can Impress: anyone who likes puzzles

The Quick Trick: Find out their ages. The clone will be seconds, minutes, days, or years younger. Also, if you’re willing to wait it out, you’ll find clones tend to die faster.

The Explanation:
Clones are basically organisms that have been created from a single individual through asexual reproduction. In the recent past, sheep (like the infamous Dolly), mice, cows, kittens, and dogs have all been cloned, much to the chagrin of ethicists and religious leaders around the globe. In fact, the looming possibility of human cloning has added urgency to their platform.

While the genetic makeup of a clone and its original are almost entirely identical (with less than 1 percent discrepancy between their genetic codes), clones don’t always look exactly like their originals. Cloned dairy cows, for instance, may have spots in different locations and slightly different personalities—perhaps because they come out of separate uterine
environments.

Scientists don’t have a good understanding of why clones tend to age prematurely and die young. Dolly the sheep, for instance, developed arthritis when she was just 2, and died at 6 of a lung disease extremely rare in young sheep, whereas the life expectancy of a sheep is about 12. The problem may be that having an identical genetic makeup doesn’t mean that all those genes will be expressed identically, and clones may not be able to express genes as eff ectively. But all this talk of expressing genes leads us to Express Jeans. . . .

It’s in the Jeans
Anyone who’s purchased jeans in the past decade has no doubt noted the price infl ation. But the world’s most expensive jeans? Those would be the tricked-out blue jeans from APO, which have a diamond-studded main button and rivets of precious metals (somewhere Levi Strauss must be rolling in his grave) and cost $4,000!

Rael Problems in Cloning
The Raelian Movement (which got its start when a guy named Rael Claude Vorilhon self-published a book called The Message Given to Me by Extra-Terrestrials) believes that really smart space aliens created life on earth through genetic engineering. Rael also prophesied way back in the mid-1970s that human cloning would prove to be the key to immortality. Perhaps that’s why a Raelian-funded corporation, Clonaid, announced on December 26, 2002, that a cloned baby had just been born. However, the group has consistently refused to let anyone see this purported “baby,” and pretty much everyone agrees the “cloning” was a hoax. However, the Raelians sue every publication that points out the ridiculousness of their cloning claims, so we’d just like to go on record saying that we’re sure the Raelians probably have cloned a baby and certainly aren’t completely nuts!