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WHO advised to lead genome-editing policy
The World Health Organization (WHO) should assume a leading, global role in efforts to regulate genome editing, according to an advisory group. The committee was formed after biophysicist He Jiankui shocked the world in 2018 by announcing that he had used the CRISPR genome-editing technique to alter embryos that were implanted and led to the birth of two children. The advisers also say that genome editing should not yet be used to make modifications that can be passed on to later generations.
Why the pandemic reduced asthma attacks
The number of asthma attacks across the United States has dropped dramatically during the pandemic, leading doctors to rethink some of their long-held assumptions about the chronic condition. The declining trend suggests that triggers such as routine cold and flu viruses, which almost disappeared during the pandemic, could play a larger role in asthma attacks than previously thought.
Award winner
Step inside a trio of big-physics experiments
For more than half a century, Japan has been at the forefront of big physics, asking fundamental questions about the laws that govern the workings of the universe. Over three episodes, take a rare look inside three of its flagship experiments: Super Kamiokande, the world’s largest neutrino detector; KAGRA, the world’s most advanced gravitational-wave detector; and Belle II, the experiment that could revolutionize particle physics.
Nature | 3 ten-minute videos (from 2020)
This Super Kamiokande video just won the Association of British Science Writers’s top video award.
Where I work
Evolutionary ecologist Germán Orizaola Pereda studies how amphibians in Chernobyl have changed, physically and genetically, 35 years after the nuclear accident. “Chernobyl is a phenomenal place to study rapid evolution,” says Orizaola Pereda. “Frogs in the exclusion zone are darker than those outside it, thanks to higher levels of melanin, which might be an adaptation that protects them from ionizing radiation.” (Nature | 3 min read)