Policing technology giant Flock is modifying police officers' access to its national network of licence plate readers. The change comes amid criticism over mass surveillance and reports of officers using the technology to harass and intimidate current or former romantic partners.
To combat this, the company will require officers to enter a criminal case number before searching its database and will expand automated auditing of suspicious searches. However, since Flock will not verify those case numbers, officers could find ways to circumvent the safeguards.
This week, journalists spoke with scientists who have found a way to turn male mouse embryos into females using a CRISPR-based approach to essentially eliminate the Y chromosome. The method allowed them to create female clones of male mice. Researchers hope their approach will be useful in conservation efforts, particularly in cases where only a few individuals of a species might remain. However, cloning has multiple uses, from genetic modification of livestock to recreating beloved pets.
In 2017, Deanne Taylor attended a presentation on the Human Cell Atlas, an ambitious attempt to map every cell in the human body. Taylor was surprised and then concerned, as the project's researchers had only planned to study adults. Children's cells differ from adult cells in how they express genes, which can cause drastically different and even fatal responses to drugs that adults tolerate well. Since then, Taylor has pushed the Human Cell Atlas to include children and is working on a major database of healthy paediatric tissue. The goal is to give researchers a baseline for how children develop and potentially reveal how diseases that emerge in adulthood begin much earlier.