Crispr Pioneer Jennifer Doudna Has the Guts to Take On the Microbiome | Turbine troubles have sent wind energy stocks tumbling — and a slew of issues remain | Meet India’s mega-wealthy | The Age of Great-Power Distraction

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� � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Crispr Pioneer Jennifer Doudna Has the Guts to Take On the Microbiome - WIRED    I see you, reader. You drink the probiotic seltzer, with its gut-improving bacteria, and the fiber-filled prebiotic. You regularly consume eclectic fermented foods and burly amounts of kale to diversify those precious microbes in your digestive tract. Because, after all, what isn’t the microbiome responsible for? It’s been all the rage for the past few years, with scientists hoping it could help treat everything from immune disorders to mental illness. How exactly that will work is something we’re just starting to explore. This spring, the effort got a boost when UC Berkeley biochemist and gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna, who won a Nobel Prize in 2020 for coinventing Crispr, joined the pursuit. Her first order of business, spearheaded by Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute: fine-tuning our microbiome by genetically editing the microbes it contains while they’re still inside us to prevent and treat diseases like childhood asthma. (Full disclosure: I teach at Berkeley’s journalism school.) Oh, she also wants to slow climate change by doing the same thing in cows, which are collectively responsible for a shocking amount of greenhouse gas. As someone who has written about genetic engineering in the past, I have to admit that my first reaction was: No way. The gut microbiome contains around 4,500 different kinds of bacteria plus untold viruses, and even fungi (so far: in practice we’ve only just started counting) in such massive quantities that it weighs close to half a pound. (Microbes are so tiny that 30 trillion bacteria would weigh roughly 1 ounce. So half a pound is a lot.) Figuring out which ones are responsible for which ailments is tricky. First you need to know what’s causing the problem: like maybe something is producing too much of a particular inflammatory molecule. Then you have to figure out which microbe—or microbes—is doing that, and also which gene within that microbe. Then, in theory, you can fix it. Not in a petri dish, but in situ—meaning in our fully active, roiling, squishing stomach and intestines while they continue to do all the stuff they usually do. Continued here Turbine troubles have sent wind energy stocks tumbling — and a slew of issues remain - CNBC    As the biggest players in wind energy gear up to report quarterly earnings, supply-chain reliability issues are front and center for both stock analysts and industry leaders. Siemens Energy made the headlines earlier this year when it scrapped its profit forecast and warned that costly failures at wind turbine subsidiary Siemens Gamesa could drag on for years. It sparked concerns about wider problems across the industry and thrust Europe's wind energy giants' earnings into the spotlight. Continued here Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Meet India's mega-wealthy - The Economist    Indian plutocracy can seem set in stone. The top two spots in the annual rich list compiled by Hurun, which tracks such things, invariably go to the Ambani and Adani clans. This year is no different. Mukesh Ambani came in first, with a fortune of $98bn. He displaced Gautam Adani, a rival industrialist and last year’s winner, whose riches clocked in at $58bn. Peer lower down the ranking, though, and the story is one of change. First, the ranks of India’s ultra-wealthy are growing. Hurun’s lastest list identifies 1,319 fortunes of $120m or more (its benchmark for inclusion). That is 216 more than last year. The main sources of affluence are not what you might consider the traditional routes to riches, such as industry, finance and information technology. Instead they are consumer goods, materials and health care. Alkem Laboratories, a maker of generic drugs, helped elevate 11 people onto the list, the most of any company. Asian Paints lifted ten, Tube Investments of India, which expanded from producing bicycle parts to various other components, eight, and Pidilite Industries, a maker of adhesives, seven. The demography and geography of Indian wealth is broadening, too. The 20-year-old founder of Zepto, a delivery firm, makes an appearance, as does, for the first time, the 94-year-old founder of Precision Wires India, a maker of electrical cabling. Most of India’s rich still hail from Mumbai (328), Delhi (199) and Bangalore (100), India’s commercial, political and tech capitals, respectively. But 21 other cities made the cut this year, bringing the total number of places plutocrats call home to 95. Continued here The Age of Great-Power Distraction - Foreign Affairs    Today’s great powers—China, Europe, Russia, and the United States—will undoubtedly have a role to play in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Whether any of these powers will be able to resolve or contain that conflict is far less certain. The notion that great-power competition defines geopolitics has come back into vogue after it fell into obscurity at the close of the Cold War. Unspoken Cold-War-era assumptions, however, still shadow many contemporary claims about the nature of this competition. Great powers, analysts assume, will marshal immense resources to shape the international order. What they do will shape global affairs. Using their financial and military might for proxy wars, they will remain intensely focused on each other. Wherever one acts, the others will respond in kind. For all four current great powers, the sense that this competition orients them has become foundational, integrating lines of military, economic, technological, and diplomatic effort. Russia’s war against Ukraine, for instance, can easily be interpreted as a traditional example of great-power competition. According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, his invasion was an act of resistance to American primacy in Europe. Both Russia and Western states are drumming up global support for what they regard as an existential struggle between values and regime type. The Ukraine war has, indeed, deepened tensions between Russia, the United States, and Europe. And as with the Berlin crises in the early years of the Cold War, the war in Ukraine has radiated outward, generating waves of new migrants and sparking inflation. But silhouetted behind the framework of great-power competition are subtler new developments. The great powers are no longer a binary. The United States and Europe are tied by formal alliances, whereas China and Russia have a loose partnership; mostly, they do what they can not to get in each other’s way. New forms of military, economic, and technological competition, such as U.S. subsidies for green technology, pit Europe and the United States against each other, and the United States’ and China’s profound economic interdependence make them irresolute adversaries. Toxic domestic politics gets in the way of the great powers’ international ambitions. Continued here

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