Once again, biology dominates and we have another article about CRISPR so let’s start with that.

• I can’t see how this can be much of a surprise, but as this article states, it has been found that usage of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique can cause hundreds of unintended mutations. This is based on an experiment in which the whole genome of mice that had undergone editing with the mice were sequenced to look for all mutations as opposed to looking merely at sites which the researchers were attempting to change. So far they haven’t noticed anything obviously wrong with the animals in question but it’s clear that scientists must be aware of unintentional side effects when they employ technique.
• Next up is a very impressive experiment in which scientists showed some monkeys photographs of human faces and then recreated those photographs from recordings to the monkeys’ brain ways. In effect, they were able to read the brains of the monkeys, or at least that specific part of their brains responsible for recognizing faces, the so-called face patch regions. Apparently sampling electrical readings of around 100 neurons from the face patch regions was sufficient to recreate images that are eerily close to the photographs of the faces that the monkeys saw.
• One of two articles this month from The Economist, the only publication I subscribe to, is about a potential new treatment for autism. It’s been tested on both mice and people and it’s a treatment, not a cure, as when its effects leave the body, previous behaviors return but the improvement seems astounding. Strangely enough the medicine was actually discovered in 1916 as a treatment for the sleeping sickness spread by tsetse flies.
• Usually when I link content from The Economist for this regular feature, it’s from their science and technology section but this one is from their weekly column on language. It talks about the common perception that women talk more than men and cites an experiment which monitored participants in their daily to record how many words they spoke. The results were that on average men and women spoke about the same number of words per day but that audiences tend to report that women speak more even when both are reading the exact same script.
• Finally, here’s a fascinating article about the domestication of cats. It claims that cats, unlike pretty much every other animal reared by humans, have never been properly domesticated. Based on analysis of cat mitochondrial DNA, humans began breeding cats only around the Middle Ages. This explains why cats don’t share the typical signs of animal domestication that we see in other species such as the infantilization of facial features. However it does note that we are currently in the initial stages of domesticating cats, suggesting that a few thousand years from now, cats may exhibit dog-like traits and behaviors.