News Updates

Facing an expected prospect of stronger and more frequent heat waves, three US cities have appointed “chief heat officers” to help craft immediate measures to protect public health and longer-term plans to meet a hotter future due to climate change. On the Issues podcast, Jane Gilbert, the first person ever named to such a position, reports on the challenges and responses in Miami-Dade County. As an overarching guide, her community has adopted an Extreme Heat Action Plan that features use of extensive public communication, targeted ways to cool individual homes and shelters equitably, and broader approaches to cooling entire neighborhoods.

A new company is pushing to reformulate the gene-editing tool CRISPR in hope of tackling a range of hard-to-treat diseases, and investors are eyeing a potential multibillion-dollar market, Forbes magazine reports. In an Issues interview, Jennifer Doudna, who shared a Nobel Prize for her role in developing the foundational technology—and is also a cofounder of the company—cautions that commercialization must proceed carefully, with input from scientists, policymakers, and the public alike. The technology’s long-term success, she says, can be ensured only “by applying it responsibly and allowing it to be fairly assessed by those in need.”

Federal scientists are warning that some coral reefs in the Florida Keys are losing their color earlier than normal this summer due to record-high water temperatures, an indication that the reefs “are under stress and their health is potentially endangered,” the AP reports. In an earlier look in Issues, Tundi Agardy examines how coral reefs in numerous US locations are under threat, not only by warming waters but also by overfishing and pollutant runoff from coastal lands, among other forces. Protecting these fragile ecosystems, she concludes, will require cooperation among the scientific community, private businesses and citizens, and policymakers.

Earth has entered a new geologic epoch, called the Anthropocene, according to a group of experts who study how humans have changed the planet and its ecosystems. In Issues, Braden Allenby proposes some basic principles to help society navigate this new world. One tenet is that we shouldn’t aim for silver-bullet “solutions” to global problems—an unrealistic goal, the author concludes—but rather for ways to manage complex emerging conditions more broadly. This will require, among other things, “the conscious cultivation of technological, institutional, and social options—a toolkit for adapting rapidly to changes in Earth systems.”