The Download: CRISPR’s climate promises, and protecting forests with tech

Jennifer Doudna, one of many inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing software CRISPR, says the expertise will assist the world grapple with the rising dangers of local weather change by delivering crops and animals higher suited to hotter, drier, wetter, or weirder situations.

The grand hope is that CRISPR’s means to exactly take away particular components of the DNA throughout the present genomes of crops and animals will assist keep away from lots of the pitfalls of earlier adaptation strategies. However there are nonetheless appreciable obstacles.

Final month, Doudna sat down with MIT Know-how Assessment on the sidelines of the Local weather & Agriculture Summit on the College of California, Berkeley. Read what she has to say about the future of genetic editing.

—James Temple

Job title of the longer term: Digital forest ranger

When Martin Roth started his profession as a forest ranger within the Eighties, his job was to look after the forest in a means that will guarantee continuity for many years, even centuries. Now, with local weather change, it’s extra about planning for an unsure future.

Roth makes use of the three,000 acres of forest alongside the northeastern shore of Lake Constance in Germany as a testing floor for high-tech options to guard nature, incomes him the moniker “digital forest ranger” (Digitalförster) within the German forestry neighborhood. Read the full story.

—Kaja Šeruga