LONDON, June 17 (Reuters) - Tayyip Erdogan seems to like the concept of "choking" things. At the weekend, Turkey's prime minister sent riot police into an Istanbul park with tear gas and water cannons to clear out the protesters. A week earlier, he had threatened to "choke" an alleged "high-interest-rate lobby" of speculators who wanted to push interest rates up and suffocate the economy.

Erdogan's harsh actions against protesters and harsh words against investors could backfire economically. The country depends on foreign investors to fund its big current account deficit. If they turn tail in response to the mounting unrest, interest rates will indeed have to rise.

The protests which began two weeks ago over Tayyip Erdogan's alleged authoritarianism, triggered by the prime minister's insistence on bulldozing one of Istanbul's few public parks, initially alarmed investors. The stock market plunged, the lira fell and government bond yields spiked. Then, after the central bank intervened in the foreign exchange market and Erdogan offered concessions last week, investors calmed down.

But the weekend's use of riot police has stoked a conflict that seemed like it might be on the point of resolution.

The problem is not so much that speculators have an incentive to jack up interest rates. This would be perverse. Foreign investors own $140 billion of domestic bonds and equities, according to Standard Bank. They will lose money if interest rates rise.

The risk rather is that investors will pull out their money if they lose confidence. The U.S. Federal Reserve's indication that it may slow down its massive bond-purchasing program has exacerbated that risk, as some of the money it has been pumping into U.S. bonds has seeped into emerging markets such as Turkey.

What's more, the Turkish miracle isn't quite as good as it seems. The economy grew only 2.6 percent last year, down from 8.5 percent the previous year - after the central bank had to hike interest rates because the economy was overheating and inflation reached 8.9 percent last year.

Turkey's biggest economic weakness is its current account deficit - a sign that consumption has been growing faster than is sustainable. The deficit did fall to 5.9 percent of GDP last year, after a 9.7 percent gap the previous year, as the economy slowed. But it is rising again this year. The April trade deficit was $10.3 billion, up from $6.6 billion last year.

Indeed, the selloff in Turkey's financial markets began a week or so before the police crackdown on protesters in Istanbul's Taksim Square on May 31. For example, two-year bond yields rose from 4.8 percent on May 17 to 6 percent at the end of the month; and the stock market fell 8 percent between May 22 and the end of the month.

Until now, international investors have been happy to fund the deficit. Not only were they attracted by the strong economic growth. They also liked Erdogan's pro-market approach, the political stability they thought he had brought and the prospect that Turkey's march towards a market democracy would be anchored by negotiations to join the European Union, says Timothy Ash, Standard Bank's head of emerging markets research.

The "interest-rate lobby" also liked the fact that the government's debt is only 35 percent of GDP and that banks have strong balance sheets, partly because they were seared by Turkey's financial crisis at the start of the millennium. Meanwhile, both Moody's and Fitch recently upgraded the country to investment grade.

The problem is that the unrest is casting doubt on some of these positive factors. For a start, Turkey no longer looks so stable politically. Then there's the fact that Erdogan's attack on speculators is sowing doubts about the depth of his commitment to markets. Furthermore, the crackdown on protesters may undermine Turkey's chances of joining the EU after Germany last week suggested delaying the next round of negotiations. What's more, the unrest could harm growth if tourists are deterred from visiting and domestic consumers become more cautious.

A particular weakness is that the current account deficit has been largely funded with hot money. The share accounted for by foreign direct investment - long-term money that can't easily run away - has been falling, according to Morgan Stanley. Meanwhile, the share made up by debt has been on the rise.

One measure of Turkey's vulnerability to a loss of confidence is that it has an "external financing requirement" of $205 billion - roughly a quarter of GDP - over the next year, according to Standard Bank. This financing requirement is the sum of its current account deficit and the maturing debt it needs to repay or roll over. A more extreme measure of vulnerability would add the $140 billion of foreign held bonds and shares. If this tries to flee, the lira could plunge.

Against this, the central bank has $130 billion of reserves, which it dipped into last week when it helped to stabilize the foreign exchange market. This war chest, though, is low compared to Turkey's external financing needs. What's more, the net reserves - after excluding foreign exchange deposited by the banking system - are only $46 billion, according to Standard Bank.

So the central bank couldn't hold the line if the "interest-rate lobby" really did run for the exits. In that case, Turkey would have to raise interest rates, which would damage growth. And then the economic miracle, which Erdogan has presided over and which is one of the main sources of his popularity, might look like a conjuring trick. Instead of choking protesters, Turkey's prime minister should try to make a genuine peace with them.

CONTEXT NEWS

- Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan rallied hundreds of thousands of supporters at an Istanbul parade ground on June 16 as riot police fired teargas in the city center to disperse anti-government protesters.

- Erdogan told supporters that two weeks of protests had been manipulated by "terrorists" and dismissed suggestions that he was behaving like a dictator.

- Last week Erdogan threatened to "choke" financial market speculators who he said were growing rich off "the sweat of the people". Erdogan blamed a "high-interest-rate lobby" for causing volatility in financial markets and vowed to stop them.

(Hugo Dixon is Editor-at-Large, Reuters News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

(Editing by Sarah Bailey)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - After more than 15 years of failures by scientists around the world and one outright fraud, biologists have finally created human stem cells by the same technique that produced Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996: They transplanted genetic material from an adult cell into an egg whose own DNA had been removed.

The result is a harvest of human embryonic stem cells, the seemingly magic cells capable of morphing into any of the 200-plus kinds that make up a person.

The feat, reported on Wednesday in the journal Cell, could re-ignite the field of stem-cell medicine, which has been hobbled by technical challenges as well as ethical issues.

Until now, the most natural sources of human stem cells have been human embryos, whose use in research poses ethical quandaries. The technique announced on Wednesday, by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center, uses unfertilized human eggs.

Eliminating the need for human embryos could boost attempts to use stem cells and their progeny to replace cells damaged or destroyed in heart disease, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries and other devastating conditions.

But the achievement could also revive fears of reproductive cloning, or producing genetic copies of living (or dead) individuals.

Even before the study was published, a British watchdog group called Human Genetics Alert protested the research.

"Scientists have finally delivered the baby that would-be human cloners have been waiting for: a method for reliably creating cloned human embryos," said Dr. David King, the group's director. "This makes it imperative that we create an international legal ban on human cloning before any more research like this takes place. It is irresponsible in the extreme to have published this research."

Among scientists, however, the accomplishment is being hailed as "a tour de force," as stem cell biologist George Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute put it. "This represents an unparalleled achievement. They succeeded where many other groups failed, including mine."

The highest-profile failure was that of biologist Hwang Woo-suk of Seoul National University in South Korea. In 2005 he and his team made headlines across the globe when they claimed, in the journal Science, that they had created human embryonic stem cells via nuclear transfer, the same technique the Oregon scientists used. Hwang's claim turned out to be a lie, making it one of the most infamous cases of scientific fraud in the last decade.

DOLLY THE SHEEP

If the Oregon achievement holds up and can be replicated by scientists in other labs, it would offer a third, and potentially superior, way of producing embryonic stem cells.

The field of stem cells took off in 1998, when scientists led by Jamie Thomson at the University of Wisconsin announced that they had harvested the cells from days-old human embryos, called blastocysts, obtained from fertility clinics.

The fact that the blastocysts are destroyed when their stem cells are removed ignited a furor from groups that believe life begins at conception. In 2001, President George W. Bush banned federal funding for research that would create more blastocysts, but stem cells already produced from them were fair game.

Those cell lines turned out to be fewer and of poorer quality than scientists had hoped. The next breakthrough came in 2007, when Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University produced human embryonic stem cells in a way that did not require eggs or embryos. He added four genes to adult cells, and the result was like turning back the calendar: The adult cells, which he called induced pluripotent (iPS) cells, showed all the properties of embryonic stem cells, an achievement for which Yamanaka shared last year's Nobel prize in medicine.

"The whole scientific community jumped on the iPS bandwagon," said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology.

That turned attention away from a third technique for producing embryonic stem cells: the method that created Dolly the sheep in 1996. Scientists in Scotland had started with a sheep oocyte (egg), removed its DNA and replaced it with DNA from a sheep mammary gland cell. They zapped the egg with electricity to make it grow and divide like a fertilized embryo. No sperm were necessary.

This technique is called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). If the embryo is implanted inside a surrogate mother, as the Dolly team did, the result is reproductive cloning, which has also been done for mice, cows and other animals. But if embryonic development is halted after five days or so, the result is stem cells genetically identical to the donor's - and thus custom-made for therapies to treat degenerative diseases without fear of rejection by the patient's immune system.

The Oregon scientists, led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, used a variation of the Dolly technique. They carefully inserted an adult skin cell into a donated human egg whose DNA had been removed. The unfertilized eggs, stimulated by electric pulses to start dividing, developed to about the 150-cell stage.

The cells were all true embryonic stem cells; they have the "ability to convert just like normal embryonic stem cells, into several different cell types, including nerve cells, liver cells and heart cells," said Mitalipov. "While there is much work to be done in developing safe and effective stem cell treatments, we believe this is a significant step forward in developing the cells that could be used in regenerative medicine."

ODD EGGS

In succeeding with humans, the Oregon team toppled the dogma that there is something odd about human eggs or embryos, said stem cell expert Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "Published data said there was a difference in principle between humans and the mice and other animals that had been cloned, a difference that presented an insurmountable barrier to human cloning" for either reproduction or stem cells.

The Oregon team figured out how to get the egg to act as if it had been fertilized. The secret was to keep the eggs in the phase of their growth cycle called "metaphase," which is when DNA aligns in the middle of the cell before the cell divides. The scientists got the best results when they grew the eggs in a little of a substance that tends to be abundant in labs: caffeine.

When conducting the same experiment with monkeys, the Oregon scientists stopped at the production of stem cells and never implanted the ball of cells into a surrogate mother. Mitalipov said reproductive cloning is "not our focus, nor do we believe our findings might be used by others" to do it with humans.

"Reproductive cloning hasn't been advanced by this new paper," agreed MIT's Jaenisch. "If you implanted these embryos, which would be illegal, I think you would get the same results as in mice: Most of them die at birth, and the others encounter big troubles as they age."

STEM CELL FACE-OFF

Now the question is whether embryonic stem cells produced with the Dolly method would be superior to those created with the turn-back-the-calendar iPS method.

Scientists have already found that iPS cells tend to age prematurely and die. They are also created with cancer-causing genes, which could make them dangerous to use therapeutically.

Another possible advantage of the embryonic stem cells produced by the Dolly method: It takes just days, compared with weeks for iPS cells.

"If you have a patient who needs, that can be an important difference," said Natalie DeWitt of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

On the other hand, the human eggs needed for the Dolly technique are in short supply and hard to obtain, notes MIT's Jaenisch. (The Oregon team paid the women who donated eggs for their time and "discomfort.") Although the Oregon team coaxed stem cells out of every egg they collected from one of the women, other labs might not be so efficient.

If the Dolly technique becomes a reliable source of embryonic stem cells, it might accelerate clinical trials of the cells, which have been slow to get going and disappointing.

In 2011, for instance, biotechnology firm Geron halted a clinical trial that used embryonic stem cells to repair spinal cord injuries and said it was leaving the field.

The most promising human study is ACT's. It is two years into clinical trials using stem cells derived from human embryos to treat two forms of blindness, including macular degeneration, with encouraging results. One patient's vision went from 20/400 to 20/40, said Lanza.

(Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Douglas Royalty)

The 34-year-old admitted that the Confederations Cup Group A match would provide one of the highlights of his 18-year professional career, reports Xinhua.

"It's a source of pride. I am lucky to be playing it here at the Maracana and I hope to be able to celebrate it with a victory. I am feeling great. I am here to do the best I can, despite the long season that we had in Italy," the 2006 World Cup winner said Saturday.

Earlier, Mexico coach Jose Manuel de la Torre identified Pirlo as the key to Italy's fortunes. De la Torre said Mexico needed to "disconnect" the Juventus star to have any chance of winning the match.

"I appreciate his concern about me but I don't play alone. I think we will find ways to escape the defensive marking that Mexico tries," Pirlo said.

Fuel prices have a big impact on the rate of inflation in the east African economy. The rate inched lower to 4.05 percent in May from 4.14 percent a month earlier.

The economy heavily depends on diesel for transport, power generation and agriculture, while kerosene is used in many households for lighting and cooking.

The Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) cut the maximum price of a litre of super petrol in Nairobi by 5.06 shillings to 108.18 shillings, while it lowered the price of diesel by 1.90 shillings to 99.16 shillings per litre.

The price of kerosene will rise by 2.06 shillings to 81.52 shillings, the commission said.

The regulator reviews domestic energy prices every month, with adjustments made depending on fluctuations in international energy prices. The new prices will take effect on June 15, and will be in force for a month.

The Austrian parachutist known as "Fearless Felix" reached 843.6 mph, according to the official numbers released Monday. That's equivalent to Mach 1.25, or 1.25 times the speed of sound.

His top speed initially was estimated last October at 834 mph, or Mach 1.24.

Either way, he became the first human to break the sound barrier with only his body. He wore a pressurized suit and jumped from a capsule hoisted by a giant helium balloon over New Mexico.

Baumgartner was supersonic for a half-minute "quite remarkable," according to Brian Utley, the official record-keeping official who was present for the Oct. 14 feat. His heart rate remained below 185 beats a minute, and his breathing was fairly steady.

The leap was from an altitude of 127,852 feet. That's 248 feet lower than original estimates.

"He jumped from a little bit lower, but he actually went a little bit faster, which was pretty exciting," said Art Thompson, technical project director for the Red Bull-sponsored project.

"It's fun for us to see reaching Mach speeds and proving out a lot of the safety systems," Thompson said in a phone interview from his aerospace company in Lancaster, Calif.

Thompson said everything pretty much unfolded as anticipated, with no surprises in the final report. The updated records were provided by Utley, official observer for the National Aeronautic Association's contest and records board. Utley was in Roswell, N.M., for Baumgartner's grand finale jump.

In the foreword of the 71-page report, Baumgartner said he never imagined how many people would share in his dream to make a supersonic free fall from so high.

Some 52 million people watched You Tube's live stream of the exploit.

The scientific and engineering experts who helped bring him back alive "broke boundaries in their own fields just as surely as I broke the sound barrier," Baumgartner wrote.

Baumgartner shattered the previous record for a free fall plunge, made by Joe Kittinger, an Air Force officer, in 1960. Kittinger did not quite reach supersonic speed during his jump from 19.5 miles up.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 68 points to 15,106 shortly after the market opened Friday, an increase of 0.4 percent.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose seven points to 1,629, a gain of 0.5 percent. The Nasdaq composite rose 10 points to 3,434, a gain of 0.3 percent.

Investors were reacting positively to news that U.S. employers added 175,000 jobs in May, slightly more than economists were expecting and a level consistent with steady hiring.

Clothing store chain Gap rose after reporting higher sales for May.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 2.11 percent from 2.08 percent late Thursday.

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency is collecting telephone records of millions of Verizon Communications customers, according to a secret court order obtained and published by the Guardian newspaper's website.

The order marked "Top Secret" and issued by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court directs Verizon's Business Network Services Inc and Verizon Business Services units to hand over electronic data including all calling records on an "ongoing, daily basis" until the order expires on July 19, 2013.

The order can be seen at: http://r.reuters.com/kap68t

Signed by Judge Roger Vinson at the request of the FBI, the order covers each phone number dialed by all customers and location and routing data, along with the duration and frequency of the calls, but not the contents of the communications.

The disclosure comes as the Obama administration is already under fire on other privacy and First Amendment issues. In particular, it is being criticized for a search of Associated Press journalists' calling records and the emails of a Fox television reporter in leak inquiries.

Officials at the White House and the NSA declined immediate comment. Verizon spokesman Ed McFadden declined to comment.

Verizon's biggest rival, AT&T Inc, did not provide any immediate comment when asked if the government had made a similar request for its data.

"That's not the society we've built in the United States," said Kurt Opsahl, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing the NSA over surveillance inside the country. "It's not the society we set forth in the Constitution, and it's not the society we should have."

MOBILE AND LANDLINE NUMBERS

The order expressly compels Verizon to turn over both international calling records and strictly domestic records, and it forbids disclosure of the order's existence. It refers to mobile and landline numbers, though not explicitly to Verizon's consumer business.

The order is the first concrete evidence that U.S. intelligence officials are continuing a broad campaign of domestic surveillance that began under President George W. Bush and caused great controversy when it was first exposed.

In 2005, the New York Times reported that the NSA was wiretapping Americans without warrants on international calls. Los Angeles Times and USA Today later reported that the agency also had unchecked access to records on domestic calls.

In addition, a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, said that a room accessible only with NSA clearance in the carrier's main San Francisco hub received perfect copies of all transmissions.

Privacy lawsuits against the government are continuing, though cases filed against the phone carriers were dismissed after Congress passed a 2008 law immunizing the companies that complied with government requests. That law also allowed for broader information-seeking, though methods must be approved by the special court handling foreign intelligence matters.

The new order cites legal language from the 2001 U.S. Patriot Act, passed soon after the September 11 attacks, that allows the FBI to seek an order to obtain "any tangible thing," including business records, in pursuit of "foreign intelligence information."

Verizon is the second biggest U.S. telephone company behind AT&T in terms of revenue. The vast majority of Verizon's overseas operations come from its acquisition of MCI Communications, which is also covered by the order although foreign-to-foreign calls are exempted from it.

Opsahl said it was unlikely that Verizon would be the only subject of such an order and that the other major carriers probably had similar orders against them.

It is unclear what the NSA and FBI do with the phone records they collect. If past practices have continued, though, Opsahl said, they are probably mined with sophisticated software in an attempt to figure out close connections between people the agencies consider to be terrorism suspects and their associates.

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

The book, which once belonged to the critic and author Malcolm Cowley, will go under the hammer along with a group of Fitzgerald's letters and an unpublished poem in the June 11 books and manuscript sale in New York.

"The book is now almost universally recognized as standing among the great achievements of 20th-century American literature with the tragic story of Jay Gatsby, and more broadly, the American dream, resonating with readers for generations," Sotheby's said in a statement announcing the sale.

Fitzgerald wrote the Jazz Age drama while living in France. Although it was popular when it was published in 1925, it wasn't until Fitzgerald's death in 1940 that it was hailed as the great American novel.

News of the sale comes just weeks after the opening of director Baz Luhrmann's film "The Great Gatsby," starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the hero of the tragic love story.

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney; Editing by Jan Paschal)

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Alec Baldwin will host National Geographic Channel's weekly "Night of Exploration" beginning Friday, June 14, the network announced on Thursday.

The Emmy-award winning actor's first on-air hosting duty will be "Crossing the Ice," an adventure across Antarctica.

"Alec has the perfect combination of energy and gravitas that we think our Night of Exploration viewers will love," said David Lyle, CEO, National Geographic Channels. "Each week, he will introduce the compelling stories of people around the globe whose drive to climb higher, dive lower or dig deeper never cease to amaze."

This is not the first time Baldwin has appeared on National Geographic Channel. In 2010, he served as narrator for the miniseries, "Great Migrations."

Nat Geo's "Night of Exploration," airing Fridays at 8 p.m.ET/PT, is being rolled out along with five new series: "Battleground Afghanistan," "Eyewitness War," "Inside Secret America," "Inside the American Mob" and "The Castle." Returning series include: "Ultimate Survival Australia," "Life Below Zero," "Taboo USA," "Diggers" and "Doomsday Preppers."

Below is the network's description of each new series.

"Battleground Afghanistan" (Markus Vernon Davies)

Premieres Monday, July 1, at 9 PM ET/PT

Following the critically acclaimed series Inside Combat Rescue, NGC looks inside the latest chapter of the Afghan Conflict as seen by the American Marines in Afghanistan. Capt. Ben Middendorf and his men take the fight directly to the Taliban with a mission to locate, disrupt and destroy the enemy.

"Eyewitness War" (Karga Seven Pictures)

Premieres Monday, July 1, at 10 PM and 10:30 PM ET/PT

Follow the men and women of the Army, Navy, Drug Enforcement Administration, Coast Guard and other forces through the chaos of battle with real-life, first-person footage. It's their vision, their words, their war.

"Inside Secret America" (National Geographic Television)

Series Premieres Wednesday, July 10, at 10 PM ET/PT

Investigative journalists Mariana van Zeller and Darren Foster take you inside the nation's underground networks to the heart of America's most controversial issues, from guns to drugs to the paranormal.

"Inside the American Mob" (Left/Right)

Series Premieres Sunday, July 28, at 9 PM ET/PT

Take a look at the little-known but pivotal escapades, capers and cadavers that truly compose the history of the mob in America.

"The Castle" (Sharp Entertainment)

Series Premieres in August

With his 10 kids, American prepper Brent Bruns builds a castle deep in the South Carolina woods that will serve as a bunker in case an electromagnetic burst results in a massive power outage.

Below is the full schedule for "Night of Exploration."

"Crossing the Ice"

Premieres Friday, June 14, at 8 p.m. ET/PT

No one has ever walked without any assistance across the wasteland of Antarctica to the South Pole and back until now. In a special documentary, NGC follows Australian explorers Justin "Jonesey" Jones and James "Cas" Castrission on their excruciating journey to set a world record. Not only do these daring adventurers have to battle freezing weather, serious injuries, hypothermia and gear failures, but along the way they learn that a Norwegian skier is also attempting to achieve the exact same goal. See how these men, delirious with starvation and pain, test their boundaries of endurance on a nail-biting journey from which no man has ever come out alive before.

"Mystery Bear of the Arctic"

Friday, June 14, at 9 p.m. ET/PT

High above the Arctic Circle, on a remote Canadian island, an American sports hunter shoots what he believes is a polar bear. He is mistaken. His Inuit guide has never seen an animal like this before. The killing unleashes an investigation by the Canadian authorities. But no one can tell exactly what he has shot. The hunter is under threat of prosecution for a crime he says he didn't commit. Scientists pore over the only evidence they have the corpse of an animal they've never seen before. With each new discovery, the mystery deepens as they try to discover the exact species of this animal.

"Secrets of the Lost Gold"

Friday, June 21, at 8 p.m. ET/PT

NGC obtained exclusive access to one of the most important ancient discoveries of modern times: the amazing story of how an amateur metal-detecting enthusiast discovered a gold hoard of more than 3,000 artifacts dating back nearly a millennium, and valued at more than $5 million. Now, an international team of experts is on a global quest to unearth the hoard's secrets.

"The 400 Million Dollar Emerald"

Friday, June 21, at 9 p.m. ET/PT

Thought to be the world's largest emerald - 840 pounds' worth - is unearthed in Brazil in 2001. The resulting tale of deceit, obsession and folly is almost too bizarre to be believed. A California businessman claims to have bought it in Brazil for a mere $60,000, only to see his proof of purchase vanish in a house fire. A businessman obtains title to the emerald, only to lose it in a diamond deal that falls through, he says, because he was kidnapped by the Brazilian mafia. In between, the emerald spends weeks submerged underwater in a New Orleans vault after Hurricane Katrina floods the city. By the time the stone finds its way into the California judicial system in 2008, no fewer than eight claimants are tussling for control of a specimen appraised at around $400 million.

"Journey to the Edge of the Universe"

Friday, June 28, at 8 p.m. ET/PT

In one single epic camera move, we journey from two people studying the night sky, accelerate up through the atmosphere, past the moon and neighboring planets, and out of our solar system to the stars, galaxies and beyond. Traveling all the way to the edge of the universe itself, NGC goes on a breathtakingly grand tour of the cosmos to explore newborn stars, distant planets, black holes and galaxies beyond. With the help of the world's most famous telescope and cinema-quality computer-generated images, we'll journey to the edge of time to visualize the powers that forged and constantly renew the universe.

"Waking the Baby Mammoth"

Friday, July 5, at 8 p.m. ET/PT

"Mammoth: Back From the Dead"

Friday, July 5, at 9 p.m. ET/PT

It's a mammoth doubleheader for this week's "Night of Exploration", starting with "Waking the Baby Mammoth" at 8 p.m. Lyuba, a 1-month-old baby that walked the tundra about 40,000 years ago before dying mysteriously, is the most perfectly preserved woolly mammoth ever discovered. She has mesmerized the scientific world with her arrival, creating headlines across the globe. NGC sets out around the world on a cutting-edge forensic investigation into her life and death, 10,000 years after her species began to die out. In the second hour, "Mammoth: Back From the Dead," we follow a team of international scientists on an ambitious quest to clone a mammoth. The Russian government has granted leading cloning scientists from South Korea access to the best mammoth graveyards on the planet and permission to take frozen samples directly from the permafrost to a high-tech lab in Seoul. If the samples remain frozen on their journey, work can begin on finding the DNA necessary to try and resurrect the iconic ice age mammoth.

"Touching the Dragon"

Premieres Friday, July 19, at 8 p.m. ET/PT

Photojournalist Roger Horrocks has long felt connected to and fascinated by crocodiles. After an experience in Africa brought him very close to one crocodile that almost seemed to welcome the human presence, Roger wondered if it was possible for a crocodile to form a bond with a human. This simple thought took him halfway around the world to Costa Rica on a mission to find Chito, a man many referred to as the "crocodile shaman." Many years ago, Chito nursed an injured crocodile, which he calls Pocho, back to health. Since then, the two formed an unthinkable bond. "Touching the Dragon" examines this astonishing relationship between the earth's most ancient predator and a unique man, one that defies the boundaries of the natural world.