Three Ideas: Turn All the Cane Toads into Boys? Russia Wins Global Warming? Learn to Love Our Great Grandchildren with the Carbon Coin?

The Best Paragraph I've Read: In the past decade or so, genetic engineering has undergone its own transformation, thanks to CRISPR—shorthand for a suite of techniques, mostly borrowed from bacteria, that make it vastly easier for biohackers and researchers to manipulate DNA.  Crispr allows its users to snip a stretch of DNA and then either disable the affected sequence or replace it with a new one. The possibilities that follow are pretty much endless. Jennifer Doudna, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the developers of crispr, has put it like this: we now have “a way to rewrite the very molecules of life any way we wish.” With crispr, biologists have already created—among many, many other living things—ants that can’t smell, beagles that put on superhero-like brawn, pigs that resist swine fever, macaques that suffer from sleep disorders, coffee beans that contain no caffeine, salmon that don’t lay eggs, mice that don’t get fat... ... ... This paragraph comes from The New Yorker in an article titled: "CRISPR And The Splice To Survive."  The article is written by Elizabeth Kolbert. You can read the article here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/18/crispr-and-the-splice-to-survive Zac and Don talk about CRISPR technology and whether humans should consider using it more or less. Another Best Paragraph I've Read: Around the world, climate change is becoming an epochal crisis, a nightmare of drought, desertification, flooding and unbearable heat, threatening to make vast regions less habitable and drive the greatest migration of refugees in history. But for a few nations, climate change will present an unparalleled opportunity, as the planet’s coldest regions become more temperate... ... ...  And no country may be better positioned to capitalize on climate change than Russia... ... ... This paragraph comes from an article at ProPublica titled: "The Big Thaw: How Russia Could Dominate A Warming World."  The article is written by Abrahm Lustgarten.  You can read the artic