Only a handful of articles this time and the biggest one of them, which I’ll start with, is deceptively underwhelming.

• CRISPR isn’t a new discovery but it was only recently that it has been put to its current use and its importance understood. This article from Quanta Magazine gives a broad overview of the topic. It was originally discovered as a unusual gene in common E. coli and researchers only later realized that the microbes which possess this gene are able to use it to defend themselves against viruses. Effectively the microbes are able to cut out parts of viral DNA and store them so as to recognize these invaders in the future. Even later, researchers realized that this could be adapted into a gene editing tool which would enable scientists to precisely snip out a specific section of DNA and replace it with anything else. Finally, the changes will persist in future generations of the organism. As you can imagine, this makes all kinds of customized organisms much easier to engineer.
• This next article from the BBC is much lighter fare. It talks about how the signalling function of the peacock’s elaborate tail may be much subtler than previously imagined. Apparently in addition to the large size and brilliant colors of the famous fantail, it also produces an infrasonic sound that is inaudible to humans but that both male and female peacocks can detect. This effectively allows peacocks to use their fantails to send signals to each other even when not in line of sight.
• Ever wondered why we have lots of adjectives that are sight-based, for example all of the different words for even minor variations of colors, but few words for describing smells. In fact, it is difficult to think of many words for describing smells that don’t refer to the source of the smell. This article from The Economist talks about how a study of the Mani people who live in Thailand that this may at least be partially due to cultural bias rather than purely because our sense of smell isn’t as well developed as your sight. Researchers administered smell tests to them and found that they could identify smells much more quickly than a control group of Dutch people and furthermore that their language contains many unique descriptors for smells.