Under a White Sky

When the Mississippi bursts through its levees, be they natural or man-made, the opening is called a “crevasse.” For most of New Orleans’s history, the term was a synonym for disaster. In 1735, a crevasse-induced flood inundated practically all of New Orleans, which at that point consisted of forty-four square blocks. Sauvé’s Crevasse was a breach

Since the close of the crevasse period, land loss to the south has brought the city some twenty miles closer to the Gulf. It’s been estimated that for every three miles a storm has to travel over land, its surge is reduced by a foot. If this is the case, then the threat to New Orleans has grown seven feet higher. “Drive out nature though you will w

Of course, in Asia, people have been happily eating Asian carp for centuries. This is the whole reason for raising the “four famous domestic fishes” and, indirectly at least, the reason they came to the attention of American biologists back in the 1960s. A few years ago, when a group of U.S. scientists visited Shanghai to learn more about the fish,

The first mammal to be fitted out with a CRISPR-assisted gene drive will, almost certainly, be a mouse. Mice are what’s known as a “model organism.” They breed quickly, are easy to raise, and their genome has been intensively studied.

Tizard knows that a lot of people are freaked out by genetically modified organisms. They find the idea of eating them repugnant and of releasing them into the world anathema. Though he’s no provocateur, he believes, like Zayner, that such people are looking at things all wrong. “We have chickens that glow green,” Tizard told me. “And so we have sc

According to the standard version of genetics that kids learn in school, inheritance is a roll of the dice. Let’s say a person (or a toad) has received one version of a gene from his mother—call it A—and a rival version of this gene—A1—from his father. Then any child of his will have even odds of inheriting an A or an A1, and so on. With each new g

For the last few decades, the weapon of choice against invasive rodents has been Brodifacoum, an anticoagulant that induces internal hemorrhaging. Brodifacoum can be incorporated into bait and then dispensed from feeders, or it can be spread by hand, or dropped from the air. (First you ship a species around the world, then you poison it from helico

The history of biological interventions designed to correct for previous biological interventions reads like Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, in which the Cat, after eating cake in the bathtub, is asked to clean up after himself: Do you know how he did it? WITH…

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Another family of negative-emissions technologies, or NETs, takes its cue from biology. Plants absorb carbon dioxide while they’re growing; then, when they rot, they return that CO2 to the air. Grow a new forest and it will draw down carbon until it reaches maturity. A recent study by Swiss researchers estimated that planting a trillion trees could

“People have to get their heads away from thinking about whether they like solar geoengineering or not, whether they think it should be done or not. They have to understand that we don’t get to decide. The United States doesn’t get to decide. You’re a world leader and there’s a technology that could take the pain and suffering away, or take some of