A much better selection of news this month, though it’s all about biology.

• We start with a feature article about how China is leading the rest of the world by a large margin in using the CRISPR gene-editing technique to achieve new breakthroughs. This one focuses on how it is being deployed to rapidly make changes in crops, reducing corn’s vulnerability to a fungus for example or boost their resistance to insects, in order to grow enough food to feed China’s vast population. These new strains not on the market yet and they will be very soon.
• Next is this very controversial report that a notable Spanish-born biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte has been working with Chinese scientists to make human-monkey hybrids. These aren’t complete organisms, being human stem cells injected into monkey embryos that are not allowed to grow for long. But it’s obvious why even this is highly disturbing.
• As this article itself notes, the technology of editing memories has long been the province of science-fiction. While it isn’t really available yet, this review of various research avenues and techniques show that it isn’t impossible either. This article focuses on techniques that would be safe in humans for treatment of trauma and differentiates between those that focus on consolidation, meaning memories formed immediately after experiencing an event; and reconsolidation, meaning when an old memory is recalled and then stored away again. It seems that different techniques apply to those two stages.
• In lighter news, here’s an announcement of the discovery of fossils of parrot bones in New Zealand dating from 19 million years ago. The cool part is that extrapolating from the size of the fossils, the parrots must have stood a metre-tall and weighed up to 7 kilograms, making them giants. It also goes on to speculate that the phenomenon of gigantism has been observed in New Zealand, probably due to the lack of competition, but this is the first time that it has been seen in parrots.