Bioethics.net

When Australia established a vast network of marine reserves in 2012, it was hailed as a major win for conservation. But management plans for the sea havens were suspended a year later. Now, scientists are angry at the Australian government’s release last week of a draft proposal to significantly erode the size of protected areas in the reserves, opening up large stretches to commercial and recreational fishing.

Sri Lanka is facing an “unprecedented” outbreak of deadly dengue fever, with 296 deaths recorded and over 100,000 cases reported in 2017 alone, according to the Red Cross.

The JASONs, a group of elite scientists that advises the US government on national security, has weighed in on issues ranging from cyber security to renewing America’s nuclear arsenal. But at a meeting in June, the secretive group took stock of a new threat: gene drives, a genetic-engineering technology that can swiftly spread modifications through entire populations and could help vanquish malaria-spreading mosquitoes.

With the help of the gene editor CRISPR, scientists can now save videos in DNA, Nature writes. The researchers encoded five grayscale images into 104 DNA fragments per image, each made up of 33 DNA letters. One image per day was then introduced to the Escherichia coli bacterium. Because CRISPR adds DNA snippets to its host genome in sequential order, researchers were able to recover the recorded images after sequencing and put them together to see the movie.